Category Archives: Places

The Brickyard

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We’re going to talk about a car race today. This is the weekend when we take a break from pithy political observations or discussions of historical events to talk about The Race.

Memorial Day Weekend, the unofficial beginning of Summer for many of us—–

And I’m not going to be where I love to be on Memorial Day Weekend.  COVID and “Cabbages” are keeping me in my living room, in front of a television set, instead of being part of the sounds and sights and spectacle that will be unfolding in Indianapolis.

At the Speedway, the Brickyard, down on the starting grid, headed to my usual observation post as Jim Cornelison sings “Back Home Again in Indiana,” moments before the engines start. For thousands of people NOT from Indiana, that song in that place is magic in itself.

Every year when I go to the Indianapolis 500, I look for a story with a Missouri connection.  I’m holding a couple in reserve—about the only Missouri native to win the Greatest Spectacle in Racing—and about a Texan whose road to the Speedway went through Missouri and one of its legendary race tracks.

Today, we have a story that turns out not to be a story but it’s a story anyway—about why they call the Speedway “The Brickyard.”

The first 500 was run in 1911 on a brick-paved 2 ½ mile track, a huge race track in its day, at a time when the mere thought of going 500 miles in an automobile in a day, let alone in seven hours and change, was beyond the imagination of most people.

But before there was the 500, there was the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the first race track to use that descriptive name.

And before there were cars racing at the track there were hot-air balloons and then motorcycles.

Charles Leerhsen, the author of Blood and Smoke: a True Tale of Mystery, Mayhem, and the Birth of the Indy 500¸ recounts that the first racing surface at the track was “two inches of large gray gravel laid upon the natural red-clay soil…followed by two inches of limestone covered with taroid, followed by two more inches of slightly smaller, taroid-drenched gravel, stopped off with another wo inches of dry white stones…each layer being steamrollered repeatedly to pack it down hard.”   (Taroid was a mixture of tar and oil.)  The result was supposed to be a smooth, dustless racing surface. Several competitors refused to run because of the track’s condition and those that did run didn’t come close to running at record speeds.  The meet was a disaster.

The first automobile races were held in August, 1909. The first practices showed the track surface was hardly solid, that the tires of the speeding (70-80 mph) were picking up rocks and throwing them back at trailing cars, which had no windshields and whose drivers were protected only by glass goggles.  Sometimes, entire chunks of the taroid surface were flung back. Leerhsen recounts that the pavement “eroded into a ditch two and a half feet deep and eight to ten inches across that led to one car to flip end over end twice, throwing the driver and the riding mechanic to their deaths. The next day, a car crashed through the fence, killing two spectators and a riding mechanic.

Clearly, a better racing surface was needed. Concrete was considered although its track record, so to speak, was inconsistent. There were brief thoughts of using creosote-soaked wood, or a new gravel-tar compound.

And this is where we thought we had a great Missouri story to go with the Indianapolis 500.  Leerhsen records Speedway President Carl Fischer was contacted by “a St. Louis man named Will P. Blair…the secretary of the National Paving Brick Manufacturers Association,” who convinced Fisher the track should be paved with bricks, 3.2 million of them.

I started looking for references in St. Louis to Blair or the National Paving Brick Manufacturers Association, but I couldn’t find anything.  Leerhsen later told me at the Speedway he could not recall where he found that information about the St. Louis connection.

Now, many years later, along comes Mark Dill, who has written The Legend of the First Super Speedway; the Battle for the Soul of American Auto Racing.  He identifies William P. Blair as an “Indianapolis-based representative of the manufacturers’ group, drawing the description from a September 8, 1909 article in the Indianapolis Star.

So there went a great possible story about a Missouri connection to the Indianapolis 500.  But I still have a couple left in the bank.

It took a little more than two months to put down all of those 9 ½ pound bricks.  The final brick laid was a gold-plated one, put down by the governor of Indiana. Although the brick was supposed to be guarded, it later disappeared and has never been found. As car speeds increased, the need for a smoother racing surface became obvious, especially on the turns.  Asphalt was added here and there, particularly in 1936 when some of the rougher turns were smoothed out. All of the bricks on the turns went under asphalt a year later and in 1938 all of the track was asphalted except for the middle part of the main straightaway.

That’s the way I first saw the track in 1954.  The entire front stretch was covered in 1961, the fiftieth anniversary of the first 500 (and the year young A. J. Foyt won the race for the first time) except for one three-foot wide stretch of the original bricks that marks the start-finish line. A special gold-plated brick was put in that yard of bricks to honor the fiftieth anniversary of Ray Harroun’s win in the first 500. That brick still exists although not as part of the track.

The yard of bricks remains of the original Brickyard. That yard of bricks has become one of the great ceremonial gathering places in all of racing worldwide.

The winning driver and his crew gather right after the race to “kiss the bricks” as Takuma Sato did when he won his first 500 in 2017. (He got to repeat the ceremony last year with a late-race pass of Scott Dixon and a crash by another competitor that led to a finish under a yellow flag that kept Dixon from a late attempt to regain the lead.)

And as Will Power did when he won his only 500 (so far) three years ago.

One of the bricks is not a brick-brick but one of the bronze bricks honoring a four-time winner of the 500.  The first such brick was put down to honor Foyt. Others have been added to honor the other two four-time winners, Rick Mears and Al Unser, Sr.

The 500 is rich in traditions but “kissing the bricks” did not begin in May.  In 1994, the Speedway decided to allow a second race to be held each year.  It was called the Brickyard 400—the 500-mile race is reserved for open-wheel racing in May.  The winner of the third Brickyard 400, Dale Jarret in 1996, decided with crew chief Todd Parrott to pay tribute to the track’s long history by going out to the start-finish line and kissing the bricks.  Their entire crew joined them, creating a tradition that somebody will continue on Sunday.

A lot of fans can kiss the bricks, too.  The Speedway has extended the yard of bricks into the plaza behind the pagoda and on days leading up to the race and on race day itself, it’s not uncommon to see dozens of fans turn their caps around, put down their coolers, and kneel down for their own ceremony.

This year is the 105th running of the Indianapolis 500 (it was not run in 1918 because of the war, and not run 1942-1945, again because of a war).  The race is never a “given” for anyone. Unlike golf, for example, where a tournament winner gains some exemption privileges, all 33 drivers have to earn their way onto the starting grid—by being faster than all other competitors. Past wins at the Speedway and past INDYCAR championships earn a driver no favors. Last year’s winner, Takuma Sato, starts on the outside of the fifth row Sunday, 15th.  And Will Power, just three years after his victory, had to push his car so hard that it brushed the second turn wall on his final qualifying attempt, starts 32nd, buried in the middle of the last row.

This is the first race in which the average qualifying speed of the 33 drivers is more than 230 mph (230.294), breaking a seven-year old record.  Just saying it in no way conveys what a person sees or the incredible skill and courage that is on display when a car roars past at almost 240 mph—-

—and turns left with the car’s accelerator on the floor. You have to witness it to appreciate it.

It’s hard to describe how fast those cars go.  But here’s an example: By the time the race is about twenty laps along, the cars are strung out pretty well.  If you’re sitting in the front straightaway grandstand behind the pits and you watch the entire field go past you and you follow the last car as it disappears into the first turn, you suddenly realize the leader already is back in front of you. Only forty seconds have passed.  It can be breathtaking.

Unlike last year, this year will have fans in the stands and in the infield—135,000 of them, all masked.  That’s a lot of people but it will seem like only a few.  In 2011, wen the centennial 500 was run, the crowd was so large that about one in every 100 people in the United States was at the track.

The generations are changing in this country’s biggest open-wheel racing series.

Scott Dixon, who turns 41 years old in July, starts first, his four lap (10 mile) qualifying speed only .04 miles an hour faster than Colton Herta, who was eight years old when Dixon won the 500 in 2008.

On the outside of the front row is Rinus Veekay, who won’t be 21 until September. He is the youngest driver ever to start from the front row. There are similar stories back in the pack of young drivers yet to reach their mid-20s, who will be competing with former winners and other mainstays of the race who are in their 40s.  In a few years, names such as Dixon, Castroneves, Kanaan, Hunter-Reay, Power, Carpenter, Montoya, and even Sato will be history, their winning cars cold and static in the Speedway Museum.

And the Brickyard will be the realm of today’s young lions.  And “Back Home Again in Indiana’ will still be magic.

(photo credit:  Bob Priddy)

 

The Constitution and the vaccine: and the danger of selfish people

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Drew Vogel was one of my early reporters at the Missourinet.  He has had a lengthy career as a nursing home administrator in Ohio and since his retirement from a fulltime directorship has held several interim positions.

There’s a special place in my heart for people who work in nursing homes.  And for those who have been working in the industry during this COVID era, well, I’m not sure I can measure the depth of my admiration. Drew has a blog, too, and last week he let off some steam about people who think it is their constitutional right to refuse vaccinations and put others at risk.

Drew has been on the front lines in the fight against disease.  And we all know that THE front lines have been our nursing home.

He doesn’t mince words about vaccinations and the selfish use by some of the Constitution to avoid the responsibility all of us have to each other.  Listen to this good man.

I have just ended an interim (temporary) assignment as administrator at a nursing home Near Dayton, Ohio.  I have done, without bothering to count them up, something like 13 interim assignments the past seven years.

 I joke that interim work is great because you don’t stay around long enough to get fired!

 In reality, I am lucky enough that I don’t need to work a permanent fulltime job.  But I do need to work – especially since my wife passed away last September.  Work is good for my psyche, my emotions – good for my soul. There is a dignity element also – although no one has ever accused me of being very dignified.

 This recent building was one of my best interim assignments.  The staff was great, hard-working, friendly and fun.  I feel like in those 3+ months I made some friends for life.

 The guys were very positive in their approach to long-term care, in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that they had been through some adversity.

 The facility was COVID-free in the early stages of the pandemic last year until around Thanksgiving. Then there was a major outbreak.

 Ultimately, 75-100 total people – staff and residents – contracted the disease.  By the end of the year about 15 residents had died.  No staff died, but some got very sick.

 When I arrived in January two employees were off sick with the coronavirus, but the outbreak was pretty much under control. Temperature checks, questionnaires and masks were required to get in the door.  Only people with a purpose could come in. Vendors dropped their goods outside – food, oxygen, supplies – and the staff dragged them inside.

 When visitation resumed, visitors were first tested, masked and confined to a room that did not require entry into the building proper.

 In January, the first week I was at the facility, I received my first vaccination shot – Pfizer – and in February I got the follow up injection.  I was happy to receive it.

 However, even though it was free and had been proven to work, not everyone took the vaccine. 

 It is voluntary almost everywhere in America. In my facility some staff and some residents – or their families – said NO!

 The month of March went pretty well.  Then in April, over a couple weeks’ time, a housekeeper, a cook and a therapist tested positive and were sent home to quarantine. 

 Yesterday, my last day, a nursing assistant tested positive – with symptoms.

 The COVID-19 protocol was immediately initiated.  A text was sent to all staff to come in immediately to be tested; all residents were swabbed.

 As of when I left yesterday afternoon, two more cases had been discovered – both residents.  There may be more by now.

 Six cases in April and NONE OF THEM HAD BEEN VACCINATED! 

 No cases in April among people who had been vaccinated – people working side-by-side in exactly the same confines as the people who developed COVID-19.

 As the saying goes, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist ……………..

 I’ve always believed our Constitution is the world’s greatest document – at least the greatest created by a government.  It contains enumerable individual rights.  But those rights cease at the point they infringe upon the rights of others – like the right not to die because of another’s misconceptions, fear and/or puffed-up ego.

 In other words, I am an advocate of MANDATORY vaccines.  Don’t give people a choice.

 Think about it, we need a license to drive a car.  We need a license to cut hair, catch fish, or be a nurse.  Nursing home administrators must be licensed, so do stockbrokers, real estate salesmen and ham radio operators.

 The licensing list in unending.  So why not issue a license to people to go out in public only if they have been vaccinated.

 Radical thinking?  Damned right it is. And I’m aware it will likely never happen.

 But dammit death, like ugly and stupidity, is forever.

 Amen, Drew.  Perhaps one or two self-righteous defenders of their right to privacy at the expense of the right to life of others will read your words and recognize the selfishness of their attitudes.

 

 

Michael Collins

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He was the first person who could see where every human in the universe was.

Michael Collins was the Command Module Pilot on the Apollo XI mission that put the first two men on the moon.  For twenty-one hours he was alone in the CMP, Columbia, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Armstrong “were doing their small stepping and giant leaping” on the Moon, as he put it a year later in Jefferson City.  He had watched them leave in the Eagle landing module headed for the surface.  He could look out a window and see the Earth, the only other place with humans.

No man had ever been in such a lonely position as he was in July, 1969. For part of those 21 hours, he was behind the Moon, completely alone with no communications either with earth or with the two men on the surface.

Michael Collins died yesterday. He was 90.  Only one man remains alive who shared that experience: Ken Mattingly, now 85, who was the Command Module Pilot on Apollo 16.

Only four of the moonwalkers are still with us: Buzz Aldrin, 91; Dave Scott, 88; and Charlie Duke and Harrison Schmidt, both 85.  Six men who flew to the Moon but did not land are still among us—Mattingly, Tom Stafford, 90; Fred Haise, 87; and all three members of the Apollo 8 crew—Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, both 93, and Bill Anders, who is 87.

We remember Michael Collins for the day we sat about twenty feet from him (and the other two astronauts) at the Capitol on the first anniversary of the Moon landing.  NASA had put the Columbia capsule on a big truck and sent it on a tour of state capitols.  It happened to be in Jefferson City that day.  And the radio station I as working for decided to broadcast the events at the capitol.

One of my most cherished possessions is a photograph showing me at the station table with the three astronauts in the foreground. As I recall it, Governor Hearnes’ press secretary, Jerry Bryan, sent the picture to NASA and the three guys signed it.

All three had remarks that day but I thought Collins’ comments were the most meaningful—and prophetic.

“I was born in 1930 and with luck I expect to see out the end of this century.  And when I am thinking about it in 1999, I expect to remember the 1970s as a time when oddly enough, man was hesitant about pushing his frontiers back. And in 1999 we just simply won’t be able to understand that fact because by then it will have become clearly apparent that man does in fact have the capability to step out and explore his solar system and that is something we definitely should do.”

When Collins made those remarks, Apollo XII already had successfully landed on the moon the previous November. But Apollo XIII had become the program’s most famous failure in April.  The Apollo program was in suspension while the investigation of that flight went on and there would not be another Moon landing until January of ’71, with Apollo XIV.

More ominous, however, had been the announcement in January of 1970 that the twentieth mission had been cancelled. There already had been a decline in public interest in the program, despite the drama of XIII, by the time Michael Collins spoke in Jefferson City.  “Been there, done that,” in the short attention span public mind.

About two months after the astronauts were in Jefferson City, NASA cancelled flights 15-19 and then restructured the crews for what would become the last three flights to the Moon—numbers 15-17.

Those events give a special context to what Collins said on that hot July day at the capitol.

None of the Apollo XI crew ever flew in space again.  NASA wanted Collins to stay in the program but he had decided Apollo XI would be his second, and last, trip to space (he and John Young had flown Gemini 10, practicing maneuvers necessary for a Moon landing). But he left a few months later, with no regrets. He wrote in his first book, Carrying the Fire, “I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have. This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two.”

He was the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs for a while but found “long hours…flying a great mahogany desk” was not a fit.  About a year later he became the third director of the National Air and Space Museum. He set a goal of having a building on the National Mall by the time of the national bicentennial, 1976.  The ribbon was cut by President Ford for the building on July 1, 1976.  A museum statement issued upon his death said, “That building and the museum it houses stand as a lasting legacy” to “an astronaut and statesman.”

His support for pushing the frontiers back, as he put it in Jefferson City in 1970 never waivered.  On the tenth anniversary of the first landing, he said, “It’s human nature to stretch, to go, to see, to understand. Exploration is not a choice really—it’s an imperative.”

In these times when we our vision is so often by terrestrial concerns and often-petty bickering about them, we need not forget his belief that within us is the need “to stretch, to go, to see, to understand.”

Perhaps if we look less at one another with suspicion and instead see one another as having those innate desires to achieve, we might find light.

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Who is an American?

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It’s time we reoriented the history of our country. Not rewrite it.  Reorient it—because most of it starts with the assumption that this country began with Protestant English religious-freedom pioneers establishing colonies on the east coast, thus history is told from East to West.

That is a questionable assumption at best, and some would say an excuse for a nation that talks about inclusion while its national culture has created barriers against it.

The great American writer Walt Whitman refused in 1883 to take part in Santa Fe’s observance of its founding because, “We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents and sort them, to unify them.  Thus far, impressed by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashioned from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only—which is a great mistake.”

American-born journalist and historian Carrie Gibson, who now lives in London, quotes Whitman in El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America. Unlike conventional histories, her book sees our national history from West to East.

Explorers and entrepreneurs from Catholic Spain were establishing settlements in this hemisphere a century before English Protestants started settling Jamestown and Plymouth as commercial ventures.

Gibson asserts that accepting the English-settlement version of our history is the root of some of our major social issues because it has led to categorizing people as lesser Americans. And she suggests part of the problem lies in our definition of “American.”

I am an English-German-French-Irish-Scottish-Canadian American. But none of that shows up on the census form I filled out last year.  A lot of other Americans were hyphen people in the census. African-Americans. Hispanic-Americans.  Asian-Americans. And others.

I have never self-identified with any hyphens. I don’t know a word of German. I had to take four semesters of French at the University of Missouri to pass three of them. I know no Gaelic languages. I don’t say “aboot” for “about,” or refer to my car’s trunk as the “boot.”

But we identify a lot of Americans with a hyphen and Gibson suggests none too gently that in hyphenating some Americans we are subtly saying, “not white,” and in doing so we are misunderstanding our history and, in effect, not recognizing one another as equals in citizenship.

Gibson was born in Ohio but moved to Dalton, Georgia as a child, just about the time many families from Mexico began moving in to work in the factories.  She soon realized “that if my surname were Garcia rather than Gibson, there would have been an entirely different set of cultural assumptions and expectations placed upon me” although she, too, was an immigrant—from the North rather than the South; she too was Catholic as were many immigrants coming to Dalton. Her grandmother, from Italy, never spoke English well and still had many relatives in another country. The difference, she perceived, was that she and her family were “European” immigrants and our culture, as Whitman wrote, lived with the image of being a second England—-instead of being American.

 

And what is “American?”  She suggests that many of us assume too much for ourselves and exclude others because we do not recognize the word.

It is convenient to we who call ourselves Americans to forget that the word derives from an explorer who never came to OUR shores.  Amerigo Vespucci explored what we now call South America. Our continents first show up as America, with any designation of separateness, on a map of the New World drawn by Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemüller in 1507, a century before Jamestown and a century-plus before Plymouth.

She finds it presumptuous to forget that the word “American” applies to everybody from Canada to Cape Horn. But those of us from the United States like to thing WE are Americans. Everybody else from this hemisphere is somebody or something else. The most common phrase used for those coming from the south is “Hispanic” as though everybody speaks Spanish, which is another erroneous assumption.

She points to another big difference.  Gibson is two generations removed from her Italian grandmother. She is not identified as Italian-American, can’t speak Italian.  But she asks, “Are you Hispanic if you don’t speak Spanish?”  Many who don’t speak that language, however, are considered “Hispanic” no matter how many generations removed they are from their border-crossing ancestors.

That’s a nagging question.  How many generations have to pass before someone is no longer African-American.  If you’ve never spoken a word in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese languages, are you still Asian-American?

Gibson writes, “Like whiteness, being ‘American’ was designed at some level to be exclusionary; it was built on Anglo and northern European ancestry, Protestantism, and, for the most part, speaking English. There was no place for the Indians or the enslaved Africans, or even southern Europeans.”

There probably are places where cultural identifications are useful—in determining, for example, what parts of our culture are not doing as well as others and what the reasons for that might be.

But hyphens create deep and unnecessary divisions in how we see each other.

Perhaps society will solve these problems with the passage of time.  But why should we wait for time to heal the wounds we continue to insist on inflicting on each other because we do not recognize that all of us are Americans, that our roots are not in northern Europe, but all of Europe? Or that many years ago, some who came here were Africans and others were Asians?

(For decades and decades, archaeologists have discovered evidence that the first people in our land came from Asia, thousands of years before anybody from England or other parts of northern Europe set foot in America. If we insist on identifying each other with hyphens, perhaps we should let descendants of the first peoples decide how the rest of us should be identified. Would the rest of us be satisfied with a designation that implies, “Not Asian?”)

Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the worldwide bestseller Sapiens says that mankind is nearing a tipping point driven by the third revolution that has shaped the history of Homo Sapiens. First was the Cognitive Revolution, about 70,000 years ago when our ancestors gained the capability of abstract thought. Second was the Agricultural Revolution about 12,000 years ago when our ancestors learned cultivation and food raising that led to longer lives and increased and diversified population.  He thinks we are living in the third, the Scientific Revolution that began about 500 years ago. Harari theorizes we are headed toward a time when Homo Sapiens will be transformed into something different by science. Biological engineering, computing, and cyber development, he thinks, will lead to creation of “a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”

It will be the death of the hyphen. And none too soon.

Do we need to wait for centuries to pass before all of the things we let divide us become irrelevant?  Do we need to listen to those who preach hatred of our fellow Americans or is it time to banish them to caves of their own ignorance where their bones might someday be discovered and puzzled over because of their narrowness?

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When we become infinite

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(There are times when all of us ponder issues of mortality and what comes after. Those of us who believe there is something after occasionally think about what that will be like.  I hope it’s a time with all of the friends and relatives I’ve known—-although I prefer not to meet them anytime soon—and all of the cats and dogs I’ve loved who (I hope) loved me back. It’s a place where I can play softball again and where I’ll never have to trim my toenails. And, yes, with the infinity of time, I not only want to read, I want to meet many of the people I read about.  Maybe I’ll run into Dr. Frank Crane and find out if he’s accomplished the things he planned when he explained—–)

WHAT I SHALL DO WHEN I GET TO HEAVEN

The first thing I shall do is to read up for a thousand years or so.

Nothing impresses me so with the brevity of life as to enter a library—oppresses, I would rather say.

How can one find time to get even so much as acquainted with literature when a Niagara of books, not to mention magazines and papers, roars from the laws of the press in an unending stream?

In Heave, time being no matter, I shall learn all the languages earth ever had (Heaven has but one—multae terricolis linguae, coelestibus una*) clear back to the guttural clicks of the stone-age man and glug-glug of the lake dwellers, and get all local colors and hence know all life.

Celestial beings move with the rapidity of thought. Distance makes no difference. With you were on Antares; and behold you are there.

Now the science story-tellers tell us we see the light of stars that may have been extinguished centuries ago. Rapidly as light travels it takes ages for it to cross the universe, if it ever gets across at all. Hence traveling with thought-rapidity, I can overtake light anywhere along its road. Consequently, all I need to do, in order to witness with my own eyes anything that ever happened on earth is to wish myself at such a distance as shall bring me to where the light of that event is fresh.

Placing myself at so many million miles, I am present at the death of Caesar; at so many more million miles, I walk with Pericles the ways of Athens; so many more I see Moses coming down from Sinai.  So in Heaven, I shall be able to be “among those present” at anything that ever took place. Interesting. What?

In heaven also I shall have time to develop all my latent capacities. The only reason I have not written like Shakespeare is that I haven’t had time. That would take me several hundred years.

So if you meet me a million years from now on some satellite of Sigma Bootes***, you will find me to be a combined Beethoven, Socrates, Raphael, Newton, Agassiz, Newton, Paderewski, and J. Caesar. You can see that I can do anything anybody ever did better than he did it; can lay brick better than any terrestrial masons, also out-Caruso Caruso in singing, and teach your Miltons the art of poetry.

As mere duration, Heaven is rather a dull prospect; but as infinite development, it is an amazing idea. For as John Fiske** says, “The essential feature of man is his unlimited possibilities of development.”

And not only shall I increase in skill and all kinds of efficiency, but my other powers, what may they not become when they are stamped with immortality?

My memory—it will be stored fuller than the British Museum or the Vatican.

My will—it will be strong enough to move a train of cars. I speak soberly. Who knows what the human will may not be harnessed someday, as well as electricity.

My taste—through infinite crudities it will live and become divine.

And my character—what power, gentleness, goodness, nobleness, and majesty it might acquire in aeons of experience!

This is what is meant by those striking words—“the power of an endless life.”

And that high word of Paul that we shall be “changed from glory to glory.”

And from John—“It does not appear what we shall be; but we shall be—like Him.”

*Latin for, “The inhabitants of earth have many tongues, those of Heaven have one,”

**John Fiske (1842-1901), an American philosopher and lecturer was for many years a lecturer on history at Washington University in St. Louis.

***Sigma Bootes is one of the stars in a Bootes constellation known as “The Herdsman.” Astronomer Jim Kaler describes it as a “relatively modest star” about three times more luminous than our Sun, fifty light years from earth.

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Honoring Those Left Behind

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A group of us has been working on building a special monument in Jefferson City. We’re working with a national foundation led by a World War II Medal of Honor winner (The Herschel Woody Williams Medal of Honor Foundation) to put up a memorial honoring Gold Star families. I have had a small role; others have done the real work. But it is an privilege to be part of their effort. I am not a veteran although, as I reminded the group at my first meeting with them, “I have fought many valiant skirmishes at Marine Corps League trivia contests.”

One thing that kind of surprised us is how few people know what a Gold Star Family is.  In some ways that is not surprising. Unfortunate, but not surprising.

We don’t see them often these days. During our World Wars and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, they were more visible.  Families with members in the military during times of conflict could display a flag in the window of their home with a blue star for each family member in the service.  If a family member died or was killed during honorable service to their country during those times, the family would cover a blue star with a gold one, leaving the blue outline around the gold star.  Anyone going past a home with a flag in the window knew that somebody from that home was doing something special for the nation—or had died doing it.

In these times of limited conflicts with no massive calls to service, these symbols are seldom seen and a broad general public seldom touched by the human costs of defending our freedoms is not familiar with these flags.

But for each soldier killed in those prior wars or who dies in today’s long-ongoing conflcts, there are many broken hearts at home. Our memorial will honor those left behind to carry on in the spirit of their lost loved one.

You might have seen some of the numerous Blue Star Memorial Highway markers that have been erected since 1945 by state or local garden clubs that honor the military generally. This one is at the National Cemetery in Jefferson City.

There also is a small Gold Star Memorial sign at the west end of the Capitol, a tribute to “all Gold Star families.”

Our new monument to Gold Star Families will be built on city property adjacent to the Veterans Memorial at the Capitol, near the entrance to the Bicentennial Bridge being built to Adrian’s Island.

This is a computer simulation of our proposed monument against a different background than you’ll see when we dedicate it, hopefully in August.  The Capitol will be behind it then.

We want Gold Star Families throughout the state to know about the effort to put this memorial at the State Capitol. Although there has been a lot of publicity about the effort, most of it has been local.

If you are part of a group—veterans, civic, fraternal, church, or other—we would appreciate it if you would spread the word, and perhaps in doing so, learn of the special people in your neighborhood or among you friends who deserve to know there soon will be a monument at the Missouri Capitol honoring their sacrifice and their continued work in carrying on the spirit of those they lost.

(Photo credits: JC Parks, Missouri Capitol Commission, Gold Star Memorial Monument Committee)

A Western Paul Revere

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While looking for something else a few days ago I came across a story in a 1912 edition of the Keokuk Daily Gate City that explained how Union forces won the northernmost battle of the Civil War west of the Mississippi River. The story involves a mad ride through the countryside to warn of impending attack and a small town’s action against a stronger enemy. Unlike the story that turned Paul Revere’s truncated ride into an epic apocryphal poem, this story is a first-hand account of a wild adventure that changed history west of the Mississippi River.

Athens, Missouri (It’s pronounced AY-thens there) was a town of about fifty about the time of the Civil War, backed up against the Des Moines River that forms the notch in our border in the far northeast corner of the state.  It’s pretty much a ghost town now, with a state historic site nearby commemorating the Battle of Athens. Athens doesn’t even show up on the maps anymore (the one above is from Google). Go up to the northeast corner of the notch, just east of Highway 81 about seven miles (as the crow flies) southeast of Farmington, Iowa, where the DesMoines River forms the state boundary and imagine a dot there and you’ll pretty much know where Athens was.

About 2,000 Confederates under Colonel Martin Green tried to capture Athens from the Home Guard Troops under Col. David Moore who occupied the town. Normally he would have had 500 men but he was down to about 330 because some of his troops had been allowed to go to their homes in the area. Green surrounded the town on three sides and attacked on August 5, 1861.

But Moore’s men turned out to be better armed, with rifled muskets and bayonets while Green’s force was poorly equipped and was mostly untrained recruits. When the Confederate attack wavered in the face of better-than-expected defenses, Moore led a bayonet counter-attack that forced the Rebels to flee, never again to threaten an invasion Iowa.

A key part of the story is how the Union forces came to be better armed. And that is where the seldom-related (for many years, apparently) story of General Cyrus Bussey, then a cavalry Lieutenant-Colonel of the Iowa Home Guard begins.  He told it to Phillip Dolan of the New York World and it was reprinted in the Keokuk newspaper on January 1, 1912.

Listen my friends and you shall hear of the daring ride of Cyrus Bussey, and how it changed Civil War history in northeast Missouri and in Iowa.

“Because I was a Democratic member of the Iowa State Senate and supported the measure to appropriate $800,000 to raise troops in Iowa for the preservation of the Union, Governor Kirkwood named me his aide-de-camp on his staff, with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel of Cavalry. That was May, 1861. I was twenty-eight years old with no military education or training.

“I lived in Bloomfield, twelve miles from the Missouri border. My messenger reported to me that the Confederal Gen. Martin Green was organizing a brigade on the border to invade Iowa. I applied to Governor Kirkwood for arms but he had none.  The Battle of Bull Run had given the southerners big encouragement and there was great enlistment in northern Missouri for the Confederate army.

“I went to General Fremont in St. Louis and asked for arms. He had none.  I said, ‘Give me 100,000 rounds of ammunition.

“What will you do with ammunition without guns?”

“I replied ‘I don’t know but I’ll feel better if I have ammunition.’

“He gave me 50,000 rounds and right away it was loaded on a steamboat and sent up the Mississippi River to Keokuk, Iowa.

“The next night about midnight my messenger came to my house in Bloomfield and reported that Gen. Green was shoeing his horses and would start the invasion of Iowa within thirty-six hours with 1,500 cavalry.

“I went at once to a livery stable and asked for a horse and buggy. At 4 o’clock in the morning they brought to my house a rig —a two-wheeled sulky—and in the shafts was a mustang and three men were holding him, for he was really a wild horse just taken from the herd. It was the only horse they could give me.

“I got up in the seat, took the reins, the men let go and the mustang plunged off.  Away I went behind that wild horse toward Keokuk, forty miles to the eastward. For fourteen miles he tore over the road, over the hills, up and down and through streams with never a let up; a hundred escapes from imminent wreck we had.

“We approached the home of Mr. Bloom, a friend of mine. Here the road led down to a ravine and Mr. Bloom’s cattle filled the road, lying down. Straight down the road, galloped the horse, straight at the herd of cattle. One wheel struck a cow, the shock took the horse clean off his feet, threw him into the air and down he landed on his back in a ditch with the sulky on top of him. I was flung twenty feet.

“But good fortune was with me. The sulky was not broken, and better still, the horse was still full of life and his legs uninjured. Swiftly, Mr. Bloom and his hired man helped me to hitch up again, and away we went, the horse wilder than ever. At the Pittsburgh ford he plunged through the Des Moines River, half a mile wide, and a mile and a half further, came to the town of Keosauqua. Here I tried to stop him but he would not stop. I guided him around the square in the center of the town. Round and round he raced three times, and then a crowd of the town’s people stopped him and I got out. I left him there for good. I took the train for Keokuk and reached that place.

“I notified the authorities of Keokuk to barricade their streets against the coming of Martin Green. One of the railroad officials came to me with a bill of lading showing 1,000 guns in transit, shipped by the war department to Col. Grenville M. Dodge at Council Bluffs, for the regiment he was raising there and these guns had just arrived in Keokuk and were about to go out on the west bound train. I felt that Providence was with me. I seized the guns and the train.

“I found the ammunition which General Fremont had sent, and by more wonderful good fortune, the cartridges were exactly right for the caliber of the guns.

“Immediately I gave 100 of the guns to Gen. Belknap, afterwards secretary of war, and 100 to H. J. Sample. I got on the train with 800 guns. At Athens, Mo., Col. David Moore was in camp with 300 loyal Missourians armed with a few shotguns. I gave him 200 rifles. A few miles further up, I left 100 guns with Capt. O. H. P. Scott.  At Keosauqua I left 200 guns. The other 300 guns I took to Ottumwa, hired a wagon, and hauled them to Bloomfield, my home, where three companies were promptly raised, and I immediately started back to Keokuk.

“On the way, I received a message from Col. Moore telling me Green’s forces were advancing on him and a battle was momentarily expected. A special train brought a detachment to his aid.

“Moore had barricaded the streets of Athens. Green attacked him but the resistance was so strong that Green retired. For two days my Home Guard continued to arrive at Athens. Then Col. Moore, in command, followed the rebels into Missouri. They never came back to Iowa.

“Having seized the guns without warrant—ordinarily a great offense—I started to get my action legalized. Gen. Fremont said to me, ‘You have rendered a very important service. You have shown fitness for command. Next day he appointed me Colonel and authorized me to raise a regiment of cavalry. In ten days I had 1,100 men in camp, mustered in as the Third Iowa Cavalry.

“But I have never ceased to wonder what would have happened if that wild mustang had not landed on his back in the soft ditch and thus saved his legs to carry me on.”

And that’s how Moore’s men at Athens became better armed than the  much larger force of Confederates and how a little battle in a now-gone northeast Missouri town stopped a Confederate invasion of Iowa.

The battle was the beginning of a distinguished military and civilian life for Bussey. He was Grant’s chief of cavalry at Vicksburg and commanded Sherman’s advance guard at Jackson Mississippi.  He became a wartime Major-General in 1865. For a short time after the war he was a commission merchant in St. Louis and New Orleans before becoming a lawyer. During the Harrison administration (1889-1893) he was Assistant Secretary of the Interior.  At the time of the interview he was described as “a spare, medium-size man, showing few marks of his long life of great activity, he is mentally keen and keeps the dry humor of an Iowa pioneer.”

He died in 1915 at the age of 81.  He and his wife are buried in Arlington National Cemetery under an imposing monument.

The Paul Revere of the west, he was—except that, unlike Revere, he was propelled by a wild mustang and he completed his mission.  And he changed the history of the Civil War west of the Mississippi.

(The picture is from History of Iowa from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (1903)

Having Fun With Snowplows

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Having fun?

We aren’t likely to look at snowplows humorously and the people who have spent hours in bitter cold and snow driving them recently probably don’t find much about their work that is funny.

But in Scotland—-snowplows are funny. They call them “Trunk Road Gritters” there, perhaps because—as with our snowplows the trucks have blades on the front and grit-spreaders on the back.

Scotland is a nation almost as large as South Carolina. It is less than half the size of Missouri but has almost as many people (5.454 million there, about 6.1 million here).

The gritters in Scotland have names. Punny names.

Salt Disney

Blizzard of Oz

Lord Coldemort

You’re a Blizzard, Harry

Mary Queen of Salt

Tam O’Salter

Ice Destroyer

Salty

Rumble

Sprinkle

William Wall-Ice  (William Wallace was a Scottish patriot. Mel Gibson played him in a movie)

Gonna Snow Dae That

Oor Chilly

Sled Zeppelin

Traffic Scotland has an interactive map that tracks each of them and records where they’ve been for the last couple of hours. You can check their locations  on the Traffic Scotland map: https://scotgov.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=2de764a9303848ffb9a4cac0bd0b1aab

Perhaps the Missouri Department of Transportation can add a little glamour to our hardworking snowplow crews by giving Missouri names to its snowplows.  One is a Kansas City journalist who covered China for decades. His name really was E. C. Snow.

Maybe Thomas Hart Bensalt

Snow Faurot

John J. Persnow

Harry Ice Truman

Slusch Lite

Sam Salton (for the Columbia native who founded WalMart)

Slush Limbaugh

Charles Cinderbergh

(stealing from the Scots): Salt Disney

Or more generically:

Where Have All the Plowers Gone?

Windchill Wills (for the old movie star)

Snowchilly Distanced

The Boone Slick

Cold County

Chillycothe

Monsandco

Political Slush Fun

Skid More

Slide-dalia

Snow Daze

Okay, this is getting sillier and siller. But that doesn’t mean you can’t join the merriment by adding better suggested snowplow names in our “comments” below. Who knows? Maybe MODOT will try to lighten the mood in the next big snowstorm by send out plows with names.

Nancy and I are hoping to go to Scotland later this year, Covid willing. We hope we don’t need to witness Sled Zeppelin at work but we’ll be on some of the roads where these gritters operate. Nancy is a property owner in Scotland and thus is entitled to the title of “Lady.”  A few years ago I gave her a Christmas present of one square foot of land in a nature refuge. She has the title to the land and everything.   I doubt that we’ll visit her property and we probably won’t spend any money making improvements to it.

On those bitter, nasty winter days when your car is progressing at seven miles an hour behind a snowplow, the time might pass a little faster if you try to think up a good name for the plow.

No, it’s not what you call it.  It’s what you would name it.

‘Snow big deal.  You can do it.

NOTES FROM A QUIET STREET, HOLIDAY EDITION 

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It has been a while since we spoke from our lofty position on this quiet street of things not worthy of full blogitty. We have been saving up these random observations since our last haircut, or more accurately our most recent one, which means there’s a lot here. During your faithful scribe’s most recent haircut the barber thought he had discovered a growth on the side of my head. I was concerned until he announced it was just my ear.

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Your obedient servant does not want to return to normalcy after the Trump presidency. Presidential candidate Warren Harding used the word during his 1920 campaign and his wish for the America mentality to return to what it was before The Great War.  Although the word is found in some dictionaries as far back as 1857, Harding’s use of it made it popular and something repeatable for generations long after his.

Eugene P. Trani, writing for the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, says Harding is ranked by historians as one of our worst presidents because, “Unlike other modern Presidents, such as Ronald Reagan, who possessed conventional minds and who thought simply, Harding never understood where he wanted to take the nation. Nor could he communicate his message effectively, because he had none to communicate. He spoke about a “return to normalcy,” but he had no idea what this slogan meant. Lacking the moral compass of a Reagan, Harding had no guide to follow. He was lucky to have had a few good men in his cabinet who generally ran fiscal and foreign affairs well. In the end, it was not his corrupt friends that tarnished his legacy and undermined his historical impact. Rather, it was his own lack of vision and his poor sense of priorities that positioned him so low in the ranking of U.S. Presidents.”

This is not the kind of man I want setting the standard for the use of the English Language.  From our lofty position, we believe the word should be “normality.”

And My Lord! Do we ever need that.

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About our lofty position—it’s time you learned the truth:

Our loft is in our house on a quiet Jefferson City street.   You can’t actually see where we write these important missives because there’s a lot of flotsam and jetsam between the railing and the writing shrine.  But that’s our lofty position.  If the place looks trashy, let us remind you this is a HOME, not a museum.

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I saw my neighbor working in his yard the other day.  I wanted to go talk to him but I was worried that I’d be run over in the street.

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Anybody else bored. to. death. because of this virus?

We’re hanging in there.  But we can only watch Hamilton so many times.  And we’re sooooooo tired of some kinds of television commercials. One of the greatest insults to intelligence caused by the extended hours watching television because of pandemic-induced mobility limits is seeing an epidemic of commercials from law firms rounding up a lot of people to take part in class-action lawsuits. We have yet to see a commercial telling how much the firm will keep and what the average damage payment will be.

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(Speaking of which, we pause for this message from a sponsor):

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Did you feel stressed as you coughed and tried to catch a breath?

Have you ever thought you might suffocate before you were able to get some air in your lungs/

You might be entitled to damages for inconvenience, uncertainty, and lasting damage to your mental health, and we are here to help you.

I am a non-attorney spokesperson and if you or any members of your family have ever choked to death or almost choked to death on your own spit, call our law firm. We will fight for you as we seek justice from the makers of Saliva.  Producers of Saliva have incomes totaling in the billions of dollars and could be liable for large damage awards for those who have struggled against spit strangulation.

Your first consultation is free.  We won’t tell you if we’re anywhere close to your town or state, but if you call now, 888-555-0000, we’ll send you our book on spit strangulation at no charge.

You deserve justice.  Call 888-555-0000 now!

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Now that we have vaccines against the virus, when will we get one to protect us from the physical and mental deterioration caused by binge-watching. At this point we aren’t sure whether it’s more important to get a shot that protects us from the virus or whether to get one that ends ROKU searches through Disney plus, Acorn, Netflix, PBS, National Geographic, YouTube, or the channels providing old TV shows such as Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life or the Bob Newhart channel or the Story Lady Channel.

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We’ll know when we have exhausted all other possibilities when we start watching shopping channels until midnight each night.

(Now, a word from another sponsor):

(Cute eight-year old kid): “I had to live with ugly scabs on my knees every time I fell on the sidewalk—until a friend told me about Zxxvvqnt. I tried it and within weeks my scabs went away.  Now I have the happiest knees in town!”

(Announcer): Zxxvvqnt, the magical scab healer, can restore your knees or your elbows, or even your forehead to their natural beautiful state in just days!  Laboratory-tested Zxxvvqnt is a non-animal-based cure for ugly scabs wherever they might be.

(Kid): “Just smooth it on four times a day and see pink skin come right back!”

(Announcer then spends the next 40-seconds speaking rapidly while print too small to read on a 60-inch screen scrolls past even more rapidly, warning viewers that Zxxvvqnt should not be taken internally, that it could lead to amputation or permanent scarring.  It should not be used by people who know better than to use it.  Best if used in conjunction with a large bandage over the injured area, leaves stains on sheets the next morning without one, and sticks to legs of pants or to sleeves of long-sleeved shirts unless covered. Not approved by the FDA. Not sold as a preventive or a cure for any disease.

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However, two days later a celebrity recommends it as a cure for the Coronavirus if applied as hair dressing.

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Ever wonder why in the world you’d use any medication that spends two-thirds of its commercial telling you how it could kill you?  Us, too.  And why would an old, wrinkled, and creaky person be interested in a substance that appears from the people in the commercials to be for young and handsome people to begin with?

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I will believe our economy is as good as we’re being told it is when I see stores opening in our malls and paycheck protection offices closing along our streets.

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Sent a letter in mid-July to Quincy, Illinois.  Got it back on September 2 marked “Unable to Forward. Insufficient Address.”  Zillow found the address with no problem. Showed me a lot of outside and inside pictures of the house, including the curbside mailbox. Told me how much it would sell for it if was for sale. I checked and there’s no truth to the rumor that the letter carrier on that route is related to Louis DeJoy.

 

A seldom-told story of the end of WWII

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This year has been the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II.  We’ve see a lot of publications about the anniversary, including V-J day, Victory over Japan day.  We have yet to see one that tells you the story we are about to tell you.

Most of us probably have seen photographs of General MacArthur signing the peace treaty with Japan in ceremonies on the deck of the USS Missouri.

But few of us probably have seen these pictures:

A few weeks ago my long-time friend, Hugh David Waggoner, called to see if I would be interested in an old trunk full of pictures from World War II that had belonged to a man named R. Sheldon Gentry (his first name was Rusaw, which might explain why he used “R” so he wouldn’t have to explain or repeat “Rusaw.”)  The name rang a faint bell with me but I have not been able to pin down who he was.

The pictures you see above are from the trunk.  The photographs and some 70-plus years old newspaper clippings tell the story behind the famous pictures of the surrender on the Missouri.  This story from that trunk is a story not often told, one I had not heard. So we’re going to tell it today because we doubt many of you have heard it, either.

One of the people in the third picture above is of extremely special interest because without him the war might have gone on longer than it did with consequences of immensely tragic proportions beyond the tragedies that had been occurring since Japan invaded China in 1931, the real beginning of the war.

A word, first, about Gentry, who went into the Army as a Second Lieutenant and came out a Major. He was a decorated photo intelligence officer who wound up with two Presidential Citations and two Legions of Merit among his medals because of his expertise in advising bomber crews about their targets. In fact, he went on several missions and helped guide crews to their targets in the southwest Pacific Theatre as the allies closed the noose around Japan.

Three days after the second Atomic Bomb was dropped, Gentry was in an American bomber fifty feet over Nagasaki assessing the damage.  A few days after that, Japan accepted the surrender terms laid down at the Potsdam Conference by the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. The notification was announced on August 15 by President Truman, the same day the Emperor dramatically announced to his nation that he had ordered all Japanese military forces to stop fighting. It also was the day General McArthur was designated the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers.

MacArthur immediately ordered the Japanese Imperial Government to send envoys to Manila on the 17th to put the surrender into effect. The delegation was to travel from Japan in a white airplane with green crosses on the fuselage and wings to the island of Ieshima where they would transfer to an American plane that would take them to Manila. The Japanese were granted some extra time to make preparations for the flight—painting an airplane, for example.  On the morning of August 19, the sixteen-member delegation boarded two re-painted Mitsubishi G4M “Betty” bombers and flew to IeShima (the Japanese called it IeJima or Iye Jima), an island in the Okinawa Prefecture.

The Betty was the main bomber used by Japan, often as a torpedo bomber—as it was at Pearl Harbor. It was fast, 265 mph, could fly 3,250 miles. One of its most notable accomplishments was the shocking sinking of the British battleships, Prince of Wales and Repulse during the earliest days of the war, the first battleships sunk in a wartime air attack. But the plane had no armor and no self-sealing fuel tanks, making it vulnerable to a few well-placed shots.  Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese Navy at Pearl Harbor and Midway, was sought out and shot down in a Betty over Bougainville in 1943.

But that’s straying from our story.

The pictures at the top of this entry were in Gentry’s trunk.  They show the two disarmed Betty bombers, as the Americans called them—Americans gave male names to Japanese fighter planes and female names to the bombers—being escorted by two Army Air Force B-25s.  The second pictures shows one of them landing.

The delegation was met by American officers who escorted them to one of our C-54s for the flight to Manila.   Notice, in the third picture, the man in the white suit, in the center, wearing glasses. He was the only civilian among the seven men who sat at the negotiating table in Manila, across from seven American military representatives who worked out the final agreement in two sessions the evening of the 19th and the morning of the 20th.

In the trunk is the first teletype message that negotiations for Japanese surrender had been completed and Japanese negotiators would arrive later on the 20th in Tokyo.

But things almost did not turn out well.

The man in the white suit at the negotiations was Katsuo Okazaki, a 5,000 meter runner at the Paris Olympics of 1924.  Although MacArthur’s directive was for negotiators only from the Army and the Navy, the Japanese government decided to have a representative of its own with the group and selected Okazaki, the former second secretary of the Japanese Embassy in Washington and then the director of the research bureau of the foreign office.

The surrender flight to Ie Jima had been a nervous trip for those aboard the two bombers. “At that time the Kamikaze corps was still strong.  We had to make our preparations in secret lest the Kamikazes attack us on the way.  It took longer than we expected…

“We flew from Kisarazu airbase,” he recalled in a late 1947 interview with Ray Falk of the North American Newspaper Alliance. “A little after noon we were off Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, where we were met by American planes. We had been given the call signal, ’Bataan.’”

(The Battle of Bataan in the Japanese Philippine campaign of 1942 ended with a 65-mile forced march of 75,000 captured American and Filipino troops to concentration camps. The march was infamous for the brutality of the Japanese, who beat bayonetted the starved and weak prisoners who were too weak to walk. Thousands of them died on the march or in the camps.)

“When we called, ‘Bataan! Bataan!’ the American pilots answered, ‘Yes, we are Bataan’s watchdog—follow us…’”

The group returned to IeShima after the Manila conference to find one of their planes was undergoing repairs and split up, with half of the group going back to Japan and the other half waiting to fly back later.

“Half an hour before our expected landing time in Japan, the pilot came back and said, ‘I am sorry but we found our gasoline tank is leaking, and we have very little gas left.’ We were flying over water. We didn’t know whether we could reach land. We knew the bomber would not float more than one or two minutes.  Come what may, I was entrusted with all the documents.”

“Fifteen minutes later, the plane crashed, and I made a compete somersault. A second crash and another tumble followed.  I was ready to jump out when the pilot came back and said, ‘Please remain calm and swim ashore.’  We had landed in shallow coastal water.”

The pilot had managed to land the plane near a beach at Hamamatsu, about 285 miles south of Tokyo.

Okazaki went into the water and swam ashore, holding the vital documents above his head. “We couldn’t see where we were for it was so dark,” he continued. “Eventually a full moon rose and we went ashore. Two fishermen from Hamamatsu helped us to get to the Hamamatsu airbase.  The villagers had been reluctant to help us when they saw the plane crash because they thought I was a B-29. We were lucky not to have been attacked as enemies.

“Anyway, we reached Prime Minister Prince Higashi Kuni’s office at 9 o’clock the following morning, only seven hours late.  The cabinet had waited for us all night.

“I can’t imagine what would have happened if I had drowned. General headquarters already was mistrusting us because we were two days late in getting to Manila. What measures the allied armies might have taken are pure conjecture. But they would have been unpleasant. It might have caused the war to continue in view of the fact that our party had to escape from the anti-surrender Kamikaze corps which wanted to continue the war.”

There might have been conjecture on Okazaki’s part in 1947 but there was no conjecture on the part of the allies of 1945 who already had been planning one of the largest amphibious operations in history, Operation Downfall, to start in November.  The second phase would have been launched in early ’46 near Tokyo. Japan knew the invasions were coming but hoped the cost to the allies would be so great that the war would end with an armistice, not a defeat.

The forecasts for casualties varied widely. One estimate from Secretary of War Henry Stimson forecast 400,000 to 800,000 fatalities and as many as four-million total casualties, not counting the 100,000 allied prisoners of war who were to be executed if Japan was invaded.

But for Russia’s late-war invasion from the north and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with threats of more such attacks—and a swimmer named Katzuo Okazaki—history might have been a great deal more “unpleasant” as Okazaki put it in 1947.

The first advance party of American soldiers arrived in Japan on August 26 with greater numbers arriving two days later, with the surrender ceremonies taking place on an American battleship in Tokyo Bay September 2. Okazaki was part of the Japanese delegation on the Missouri that day.

And what became of him?

The man in the white suit was elected to the Japanese House of Representatives in 1949. Two years later, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida name him Chief Cabinet Secretary and state minister without portfolio. He became Foreign Minister in 1952 and during his three years in that office, signed a Mutual Security Assistance Agreement with American Ambassador John Allison. He retired but was called back to service to be Japan’s delegate to the United Nations from April, 1961 to July, 1963.  He died two years later at the age of 68.

And the Betty bomber, the Mitsubishi G4M1 that carried Okazaki and the others on those historic surrender flights? The Japanese called it the Hamaki, meaning “cigar,” a reference to its shape. Wrecked remains of hundreds of them are scattered throughout Southeast Asia and in the Southwest Pacific. The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum has pieces of one it is slowly restoring. A wrecked one is on display at an air museum in Chino, California.  Two years ago Warbird Digest reported two of the bombers had been recovered from the Solomon Islands for possible restoration. There are no flyable Bettys in existence.

There are more stories in that old trunk, It now resides at the Museum of Missouri Military History at the Ike Skelton Training Center near Jefferson City. We might tell more about Gentry in some later entry.  We haven’t learned much about his post-war years, but his trunk sure has some interesting things about that part of his life and the war he saw and helped fight. Now his trunk and the stories in it are at a place where they will be cared for and appreciated.