The Devil Went Down to Macon

I am a happy camper. For several weeks now, my spell checker has not worked. It used to work, then it stopped. Since then I have been using my native spelling ability, and that has shown me just how much I have come to rely on technology.

So, how did I fix it? I will let you in on a little secret.

Some years ago I worked at a place with an information technology guru who set up our computer stuff: servers, networks, etc. Now I have used computers for a long time, but for most of that time I used them to solve equations and to do repetitive calculations. Word processing, spread sheets, presentation slides, all those were new to me, so very frequently I found myself visiting our computer guru with questions: How do I extend the scale on this graph from the spreadsheet? How do I stop the spell checker from changing US English to UK English? That sort of thing. His response to every question was "Hmmm, let's see." He would then type a few words into a search engine, and present me with the result. In other words, he did an internet search for every question I ever asked. So, that's the secret: look it up.

Unfortunately, that did not work in this case. After downloading the latest and greatest version of the software, and following all the suggestions on the interweb, I found myself still with a non-functioning spell checker. Some setting had changed, I know not what, and it was impossible for me to locate the change.

Eventually, I opened a document from 2018, moved it into the 2021 blog folder, wiped out the text, then started typing in misspelled words. Voila! Little squiggly red and blue lines began appearing everywhere. Problem solved, as long as I use that old document as the template for every new document I write. Not exactly an ideal solution, but I can live with it, at least for awhile.

And apparently I will be living with it for quite awhile, as I have now had my second Pfizer Wuhan Flu shot. I had to drive to Macon to get vaccinated, but drive I did. Je suis invulnérable!

A little over a year ago, we shut the country down for two weeks, in order to "flatten the curve". That was the longest two weeks of my life. I admit, the stories at the beginning of this mess were scary. It is always scary when we do not have complete information. It is a human reaction, to fear the unknown. Incomplete information quickly becomes misinformation, and rumors replace facts. The death rate was ramping up, in part, because we were stumbling around in the dark trying to hit upon the right treatment regime, and in part because of stupidity (e.g., placing Covid-positive patients in nursing homes).

But things began to get better. The doctors and nurses who tried everything in a desperate attempt to find something that worked eventually found several things that worked.

True, the infection rate kept climbing, and the television news readers were sure to lead with those scary headlines every night. They didn't bother to mention that the death rate was falling. I have friends who had the disease, and they all tell the same tale: it was like the worst case of flu they had ever had, times ten. But the point is, they all talk about it, because they are still alive.

Common sense slowly began to return. Our local school system has been open, with students in the classroom, since the fall semester began last August. Our local hospital is new, but small. It has not been overrun with cases, and the local schools have not been super-spreaders. I drive by the baseball and softball diamonds daily, and it is a pleasure to see the kids out there, sans masks, enjoying themselves.

Things are different in the big city, but that is part of the reason why I don't live in the big city.

I also think it is healthy to see people questioning the wisdom of our overlords. Take the question of masks. Dr. Fauci did a radio interview in March of last year. His wisdom at the time: don't bother wearing masks. A week or so later that changed to "wear a mask and stay six feet away from others". Now it is "wear two masks and stay three feet away from others".

Question: if masks work, why do we need two?

Sometime around the first of April feel free to visit me here in Madison. I will be setting up a 55 gallon drum in the backyard, and establishing a new pagan ritual in celebration of our deliverance from the Wuhan Flu. I don't quite know what to call it, but its working title is “Mask Burning Ceremony”. "The Cure for Fauci-itis" seems too cumbersome.

Liberty Hall

All the history books describe him as a small man, but the literature the state distributes at his home, Liberty Hall, lists his height as five feet and nine inches. While that is not very tall, it also is not very short, especially by the standards of the 19th century. No, the reason that Alexander Hamilton Stephens is described as "small" has to do with his weight. During his lifetime he seldom weighed more than 90 pounds, which, combined with his height, projected the image of a frail man. The image was right: Stephens was frail and sickly during most of his life.

Pick up any history of the period - James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, for example - and you will find that Stephens was, in the words of the New Georgia Encyclopedia, "a near-constant force in state and national politics for a half century". His involvement with national politics spans the period from 1843 to 1882, the year before his death. He was, at various times, a member of the Georgia House of Representatives, the Georgia Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States. In addition, he was Vice-President of the Confederate States of America, and, briefly, the 50th Governor of Georgia. It should also be noted that he was elected to the U.S. Senate, in 1866, but the body refused to seat him because of his association with the government of the Confederate States. He was, later, returned to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was seated. His statue is one of two that the state of Georgia placed in the National Statuary Hall, in the U.S. Capitol. (His statue was carved by Gutzon Borglum, the fellow who carved Mount Rushmore.)

It is not possible to do justice to his biography in the short space of this blog. I do want to point to one connection I have to Stephens. After he graduated from Franklin College, which is now the University of Georgia, he began a short, unsuccessful teaching career. According to historical markers around my hometown of Madison, Georgia, both male and female academies have existed here since at least 1815. Stephens' first job out of college was a stint teaching in one of the academies in Madison. He did not like it very much. According to Myrta Lockett Avary, who wrote the introduction to Stephens' prison diary, "He then taught school in Madison for 'four months of misery.'" For the next two years he continued to teach, before giving it up for a career in law and public service.

His home, Liberty Hall, is in the town of Crawfordville, in Taliaferro County, Georgia. I have written about Taliaferro County before. Taliaferro County is only a couple of counties over to the east: just 34 miles of Interstate 20 separate the exits for Madison and Crawfordville. According to the 2010 census, Taliaferro County was the least populous county in Georgia, at 1,717 souls, and the second least populous county east of the Mississippi River (behind Issaquena County, Mississippi). That has absolutely nothing to do with this story, but I throw it in at no additional charge.

Liberty Hall is now a part of the A. H. Stephens State Historic Park, and given that it is not very far away, we decided one Saturday at the end of January to give the Arab's Friend a drink of petrol and head east to see what we could see.

The first thing we saw was the house itself, as shown at the top of this blog. The house is on the way to the visitor's center. The park complex includes the house and grounds, Confederate Museum ("one of the finest collections of Confederate artifacts in Georgia"), and the usual state park facilities: 1200 acres that include tent and trailer camping facilities, cottages, picnic areas with shelters, nature trails, two lakes, one stocked with bass and bream, the other with catfish, horse stalls, and equestrian trails. We were disappointed to learn, upon stopping at the visitor's center, that the house and museum were closed, and all tours of the house cancelled, courtesy of the Wuhan Flu. Still, the lady at the visitor's center invited us to stroll around the grounds, peek in the windows, and enjoy what we could.

The house offers a couple of unusual features. The first is the massive monument that is planted smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk leading to the house.

The second unusual feature is that Stephens is buried right there in the front yard, just a bit to the left of the monument. He is buried next to his half-brother, Linton.

These are not the only graves on the property. There are graves in the back of the house with the names William Bell, Sallie Bell, and Sarah Bell on tombstones. I have not been able to figure our who these people were. They may be previous owners, but that is not clear. I know that Stephens purchased the Liberty Hall from Williamson Byrd, a relative of his stepmother Matilda Lindsay. Perhaps the Bells were relatives of one or the other.

Stephens was a dog lover, and one of his loves was Rio, "a large, fluffy white dog". Rio, and other dogs, are buried in the back yard, their graves suitable marked with a plaque.

Stephens was a bookish man, as you would expect of an author. (His two-volume A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States has been sitting in my Kindle for some time now: I am such a slow reader.) He had an impressive library built behind the main house. We could not enter the library, but I took the first two pictures below through the window. The third picture is from a Wikipedia article on Liberty Hall.

I took the following photos through the window next to the front door.

Next to the house on the right, just a few yards away, is the Crawfordville Baptist Church. It was the first protestant church in the area (originally called Bethel Church), and was founded by, among others Jesse Mercer, for whom Mercer University was named, and who is buried in Penfield, Georgia. The small house immediately behind Kathy is the dry storage house on the Liberty Hall property.

The cemetery immediately to the right of the church is on land donated by Stephens, in 1873.

It was a pleasant way to spend a part of a Saturday, even if it was a bit chilly (see the photo of the church above, to spot Kathy shivering in the cold). We had a late lunch at Nick's Place on Broad Street, and were able to get home and thaw out well before dinner.

This trip has set me to thinking. I don't know where I will eventually end up when I retire, nor do I know where I will be living when I depart this vale of tears. But I really do think that whole idea of being planted in the front yard next to a monument blocking the path to the front door is appealing.

Abbeville and Environs

A couple of posts ago I mentioned my interest in John C. Calhoun, and noted that I had visited one of his homes, and the land on which he had lived for short periods of time. These recollections were prompted by my reading a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the man by Margaret L. Coit. The volume I have is a re-print published jointly by the University of South Carolina Press, the Institute for Southern Studies, and the South Caroliniana Society of the University of South Carolina. The reprint includes a new introduction by Clyde N. Wilson, the foremost Calhoun scholar alive today.

The center of Calhoun's early life was Abbeville, SC, and the immediate area surrounding Abbeville. This historic little town is less than a two-hours drive from our home here in Madison, GA, so one Sunday recently Kathy, Lucy, and I decided we should drive to Abbeville and "get a feel" for the man who dominated political life in this country for so many years.

Our port of entry into the state of South Carolina was Calhoun Falls, SC. According to the Historical Marker Data Base we should have found, upon entering the state, a marker on the left of state highway 72 that reads: Half mile southeast is Millwood, home of James Edward Calhoun, 1796-1898, son of John Ewing and Floride Bonneau Calhoun and brother-in-law of John C. Calhoun. After serving as lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, he developed Millwood, which ultimately included 25,000 acres. Seeing the value of Trotter's Shoals, a part of this estate, he was among the first to encourage the use of Southern water power.

We stopped to take a photo of the Millwood marker. This is what we found:

After the trip, I contacted the coordinator of the South Carolina Historical Marker program about this missing marker. Fortunately, that was the only missing or damaged marker we found on our trip.

I suspect that a good bit of "Millwood" is now beneath the surface of the Richard B. Russell lake, which was created when the Richard B. Russell Dam was constructed near this spot on the Savannah River. If you think that the state of Georgia has a fondness for naming things after our former governor and US senator, you should visit the state of West Virginia. I am really quite surprised that the state hasn't been renamed the state of Robert Byrd.

The road from Calhoun Falls to Abbeville took us by an interesting historical marker, one noting the burial ground of Patrick Calhoun, John C. Calhoun's father: “5.5 miles southeast is the burial ground of Patrick and Martha Caldwell Calhoun, Parents of John C. Calhoun; Deputy Surveyor 1756; First Representative from Up Country to Commons House of Assembly, 1769-1772; Member of First Provincial Congress, 1775; Second, 1775-1776; General Assembly, 1776; and frequently after until his death, 1796. His greatest service to his state was his successful fight for the Circuit Courts Act, 1762. Across the road is his home site.”

What I found most interesting about this marker is that it was located so far from the burial ground. It is almost as if the state wants to make sure that visitors are aware of the burial ground, but are unable to find it. We, of course, found it.

The burial ground is at the end of an unmarked dirt road. The hint embedded in the marker is the last sentence. Patrick Calhoun's home no longer exists, but there is a marker across the road from the burial ground indicating that John C. Calhoun was born on this land.

The young Calhoun erected an obelisk in the burial ground to honor his parents:

(John C. Calhoun is not buried here: his resting place is St. Philip's Episcopal Church Cemetery in Charleston, SC. I took the photos below in the summer of 2015.)

The only thing close to a building near the burial ground or the marker noting the birthplace of Calhoun is the ruin we found on the dirt road leading to the burial ground:

The beautiful little town of Abbeville itself is quite historic, and not just because Calhoun spent his formative years here, and briefly practiced law here.

When Richmond fell in the spring of 1865, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, relocated the capitol of the CSA to Danville, Virginia. While the capitol was in Danville, Lee surrendered to Grant, and Davis decided that the government should be moved farther south. On May 2, 1865, Davis and the government arrived in Abbeville. The house where he stayed, the Burt-Stark House, is still there:

The last meeting of the Confederate Cabinet and the last Council of War was held there.

There is even more to see in Abbeville, but this is about John C. Calhoun, and I have digressed enough already with this event that occurred some 15 years after Calhoun's death.

Calhoun's early education was at the Willington Academy, which was run by his brother-in-law, the Rev. Moses Waddel, DD. Although only a small school, it educated some of the leading men in the region. Take a look at the list of surnames on the marker below. If you are schooled in the history of the south, you will be astounded by the list of graduates of the Willington Academy.

Calhoun lived in what is known as the Long Cane portion of the county. A very significant event occurred there on February 1, 1760, 261 years ago tomorrow (as this is written on January 31, 2021). On that date, a boundary dispute between the Cherokee nation and the Scotch-Irish settlers of the region resulted in an ambush of the settlers, and the massacre of 23 of them. One of the survivors of the massacre was Patrick Calhoun, John's father. Two who did not survive were Patrick's mother Cathrine, and his brother James. The first picture below is that of the replacement of the marker that Patrick Calhoun placed at the site of the massacre. The second photo shows the original.

As an aside, a treaty was finally worked out between the Indians and the settlers, in 1785, which resulted in the surrender of about one third of the states of Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee to the white settlers. Another surrender that day: Anna Calhoun, John's cousin, who had been taken by the Indians 25 years earlier at the Long Cane Massacre.

The only frustration of the trip was my inability to locate the site of Bath, the plantation that John bought for his new bride. There was no house on the property, at least at the beginning, so his wife stayed with her mother at Bonneau's Ferry while John was away in Congress. We have reports that the land was worked and managed by John's brothers, but nothing else that I can find. No one seems to know where it was located. I contacted Dr. Wilson, who put me on touch with a Calhoun descendent. Neither of them know where the plantation was located. My best guess, based on remarks here and there in the Coit biography, put me in the middle of Forest Service land. Despite tramping through the forest for a considerable period of time, we came away empty handed.

But that is a project for another day. I have a couple of suggestions from Kathy that may eventually point me in the right direction. For now, it is a mystery. And I love a good mystery.

Happy Birthday, Tricky Woo!

As best we can tell, our little rescue pooch, Lucille Ball Batten, was born this day in 2018. She was a true rescue dog: she rescued us from the depths of despair after the death of our beloved Ronnie. We brought her home in March, so she has not quite been with us for three years, but it has been not-quite-three-years of unmitigated joy. We love her to death, and she reciprocates. The picture above of the birthday girl was taken just after she gave Santa her wish list, last December. Happy birthday, Lucy, and may you have many, many more!

Bonneau's Ferry

Ever since I heard the words “Tariff of Abominations” back in high school, I have been interested in the life, and the political thought, of John C. Calhoun. He was a remarkable man: a Yale graduate, member of Congress, Secretary of War and Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, and Vice President of the United States, twice, under two different presidents (John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson). Furthermore, he resigned as Vice President on a matter of principle.

How significant a figure in our history was John Caldwell Calhoun? Two tidbits of information help us to assess his public career. First, each state is allowed two statues in the Statuary Hall of the U.S. Congress. One of South Carolina's two statues is that of John C, Calhoun. Second, in 1957, a group of senators led by Senator John F. Kennedy were asked to pick five U.S. Senators for a newly created senatorial "hall of fame." Calhoun was one of the five. In fact, he is often listed as one of the "Great Triumvirate" of congressional leaders, along with Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.

He was a slaveholder, so he is in the process of being cancelled. Although he is still considered one of Yale's "Eight Worthies", his name has been removed from Calhoun College. A statue in his honor in Charleston was vandalized to the point that it was removed. Clemson University, about which more in a moment, renamed its Clemson University Calhoun Honors College as the Clemson University Honors College. Calhoun sent surveyors to the area that is now Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a variety of features there (a lake, a band, a town square, a road, and a beach club) were named for him. They have all undergone name changes. We suffer from what the Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood called the "sin of contemporaneity". We are a bit sanctimonious, in my opinion, when we judge those in the past by the standards of today. We will be judged tomorrow, and we will surely be found wanting.

What makes Calhoun a standout in my mind is that he is the only U.S. politician (as far as I am aware) who was also a political philosopher. If you are interested, I suggest you do a little research. Check out his summa, “A Disquisition on Government”. I may touch upon his work in later blogs, but for the moment, I am interested in two of his homes. I am interested because I have visited one, and I have visited the land on which the other once stood. In one case, I knew I was visiting a Calhoun home, and in the other case, I did not.

During the mid-eighties I spent a week at Clemson University, taking a short course. Wednesday afternoon was free, so I strolled around the campus, and was riveted when I saw a house on the campus with a sign outside announcing that this was "Fort Hill". I was riveted because I knew that, at least during his later life, Calhoun resided at a house he called Fort Hill. Could this be the same house? And if so, why was it in the middle of the Clemson campus?

I had both questions answered inside. There, a group of elderly (elderly, as in approximately my current age) ladies welcomed visitors and answered questions about Fort Hill, the home of John C. Calhoun. Calhoun's daughter Anna Maria, after considerable legal proceedings had resolved themselves, inherited the house and 814 acres in 1872, 22 years after Calhoun's death and 6 years after her mother's death. When Anna Maria died, her husband, Thomas Green Clemson, inherited the property. His 1888 will left the property, according to Wikipedia, "to the State of South Carolina for an agricultural college with a stipulation that the dwelling house 'shall never be torn down or altered; but shall be kept in repair with all articles of furniture and vesture...and shall always be open for inspection of visitors.'" The land is now Clemson University, and Fort Hill is still there.

At the beginning of the 1980s, I worked for a company named Westvaco, now MeadWestvaco, and Westvaco owned a plantation north of Charleston named Bonneau Ferry. The company used this as a place to entertain customers. I was working with a special projects group that included sales and marketing personnel from our New York office (I was the R&D guy), and we met quarterly to review our projects. We usually met at the New York office, but one quarter we met at the Bonneau Ferry plantation.

It was heavenly. Westvaco knew how to entertain key customers. The guest rooms were in the main house, while smaller outbuildings were meeting rooms fully stocked with the technology of the day: overhead projectors, slide projectors, and 16 mm movie projection equipment. When I came downstairs my first morning for breakfast, my waiter asked me just two questions: how would I like my eggs cooked, and how would I like my steak cooked. Steak and eggs for breakfast! Every day!

The plantation was on the Cooper River, and the company continued to grow rice near the river, primarily to attract game. It was a sanctuary for the red-cockaded woodpecker, but I gathered that, the woodpecker aside, there was an awful lot of hunting that took place on the grounds. I remember shooting clay pigeons in the back of the main house.

MeadWestvaco transferred the Bonneau Ferry acreage to the state of South Carolina in 2004, and it is now opened to the public, though I wouldn't go hiking there during hunting season, if I were you.

The buildings on the grounds are not the original buildings. They were built in the early 1900s, which is why one cannot find pictures of the buildings on the South Carolina historical websites. Still, it gave me a chill a little bit ago, while reading a 1950 biography of Calhoun, to learn that his mother-in-law (Floride Bonneau Colhoun) owned a plantation called Bonneau's Ferry, and that Calhoun and his wife were married there. Further, Calhoun's wife stayed at Bonneau's Ferry during Calhoun's early sojourns to Washington, DC, as a congressman.

The plantation was sold in 1838, after Calhoun's mother-in-law died. It exchanged hands a few times, and by the early 1900s the name had been shortened to Bonneau Ferry. Westvaco acquired it in the 1960s, and held it for about 40 years.

The biography, John C. Calhoun: American Portrait, by Margaret L. Coit, won a Pulitzer Prize. Although published 71 years ago, it still seems to be the definitive biography. I mentioned in an earlier blog how difficult it is for me to read histories of any sort, including biographies, as I get distracted and end up taking side trips to explore the places I read about. You will be pleased to know that I have not (yet) decided to return to Bonneau Ferry.

On the other hand, Calhoun was born near Abbeville, SC. That is less than a two hour drive from Madison. He practiced law and managed a plantation there. Most of his family is buried there.

Can you guess where Kathy, Lucy, and I visited last weekend?

Yikes! We're moving!

My son, Jason, takes care of the technical details of this website. I just do the writing and posting. A little while ago he told me that we needed to change domain names. I will spare you the details why, as I don’t rightly understand them myself. At any rate, we have a new domain name, DrBatten.com. For a couple of weeks, until about January 25 or so, MrBatten will re-direct to DrBatten. After that, you’re on your own. So, if you have this page bookmarked (and who doesn’t?) please take a moment to change the url. You can use the convenient link here: Welcome to DrBatten.com!

Robert Ray Jones: An Update

On October 30, 2020, I posted an article on the uncle I never met, Robert Ray Jones. If you missed that article, the link is here. In sum, my uncle died about 30 days after D-Day, his body was, as far as we knew, never found, and his name is engraved on a wall in the Brittany American Cemetery in Saint-James, Normandy, France. Yet recently my sister discovered that an elderly woman in France had one of my uncle’s dog tags in her possession. That is all we knew: she had his dogtag, and we hoped that she would be able to shed some light on his death. This post is an update, and a correction.

First the correction. I stated in that post that he, Robert Ray, was the only blood-related uncle I had never met. My sister, Debbie Lesher, the family genealogist, has since corrected me. It turns out that my maternal grandfather (another man I never met: he died five years before I was born) had an out-of-wedlock son prior to marrying my grandmother. The son was born in May of 1918, and died in 1985, a few weeks short of his 67th birthday. That hurts: my last birthday was number 68.

Now to the update. They are contained in emails. I include no last names, and reproduce the emails exactly as received (except, of course, for the last names). The first was written on the evening of January 3, 2021:

Dear Karen and Bob,

Time is flying, I realize we're now reaching 2021... Let me wish you all the best for this New Year! Let us all hope that 2021 could bring us so much more than the previous year! We're still full of hopes for April (Jazz festival in Coutances) or June (D-Day celebrations) when you are more than welcome to stay with us and enjoy the best of springtime in Normandy.

I haven't forgotten about the Dog Tag, and have been able to find out where precisely the tag had been found in July 1944. The place is known as Le Buhot, a farm where our former neighbour used to live back in the day. It is on the other end of Hambye, in some beautiful apple orchard... I'll send you a few pictures taken a few days ago. No doubt the soldier's niece will be glad to have them.

I was told that the tag was found there some time after the battle, but not much more information yet. I'll try to have a word with my former neighbour, Marie-Thérèse (then aged 18) who was the one person who discovered the dog tag. She was the person who gave me the tag, back in the 1990s or early 2000s. She also gave my nephew, Pierre (now a Captain in the Gendarmerie, currently in Martinique, then only a teen...) the second dog tag found on the same location. I have talked to him about it, and hearing that the original tag had been given back to the soldier's relative, is now willing to do so as well. He will either send it by post, or best is thinking of traveling to the USA to do that himself. Do you think Bob would be interested to go? Why not plan a trip there next summer, the three of us and organise some sort of a reunion/celebration with the family of this fallen American GI? That seems the least to do, to honour someone who gave his life for our freedom...

Please tell Bob about that.

We are back at school tomorrow, but I'll make sure you get the pictures before long.

Take care, the best is to come.

Bertrand, Carole and Clara.

The next email was sent the following day. It had pictures.

Hi again,

This is a photo of the Buhot, where Marie-Thérèse used to live with parents and two brothers. They are now deceased, only Marie-Thérèse is still alive, now living nearby in Bréhal by the seaside.

She is losing memory somehow, which explained why I haven't yet contacted her about the dog tag. Maybe she remembers well, maybe not. We have to see her on a good day...

I'll try to arrange something in the next few weeks.

Just opposite the farm, across the road is the orchard where the tag was found. It must have been on a temporary grave, left in July before being transfered to the nearby US war cemetary in Le Chefresne. (All US casualties in the vicinity were re-buried in Le Chefrene, to rest there till the 1960s, when the authorities decided to transfer all the graves to Mont de Huisnes Cemetary, in La Baie Du Mont St Michel.)

About 10 to 15 years ago, I happened to meet a group of veterans and their descendants aboard their Jeeps, Harleys and AM8 armoured cars (shipped from the USA for the occasion) that were honoring their dead in Le Chefrene. Sadly no picture was taken then.

Here are the three pictures included in that email.

The third email, dated January 4, 2021, contained three more photos.

Another view of the family's farm.

I don't remember more about the circumstances the tag had been found, though I suspect the tags were discovered when the soldier's body was exhumed some time after the fighting. That explains why the tag I handed you was still covered in dust/mud, just like the one in the possession of Pierre. No doubt, Marie-Thérèse's dad knew how the soldier had met his own death there, but he is long gone (I never had a chance to meet him, even when I was a young child...).

As far as I remember, Marie-Thérèse lived on the other side of Hambye (near where we live) with her husband, while her two brothers and parents continued to live in Le Buhot.

I'll keep you updated as soon as I gather more information.

Hope to hear from you soon.

It may be that we will learn more about Robert Ray Jones’ death, but if we don’t, I am satisfied. We know a lot more now than we did, thanks to some very kind people on both sides of the Atlantic (or, on the other side of the Atlantic and on this side of the Pacific). If Pierre does decide to return the other dog tag in person, we will have a very nice, happy get-together.

We can thank modern technology, and the fact that the world wide web ties us all together, for the knowledge we have about the fate of my unknown uncle. The implication from all this is that he is in fact buried, in an unmarked grave, in Mont de Huisnes Cemetary, in La Baie Du Mont St Michel.

Goodbye To All That

I have, as a general rule, enjoyed decadal years. My first, 1960, was a good year, even though I was in school, and no longer had the freedom of a child. It was an exciting time: we were poised to go into space, and the grandparents in the White House would soon be replaced with someone much younger, whether Nixon or Kennedy. The year 1970 was another excellent year. We had landed on the moon the previous year, and it was clear that we (as a country) could do anything we wished, except, perhaps, to extricate ourselves from Vietnam. I began that year as a high school junior (the best year of high school, in my opinion) and ended the year as a senior.

The decadal year of 1980 was a year of hope. The preceding year saw the return of gasoline lines, the Iranian hostage situation, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Things must surely get better in the new year. Things did eventually get better, and I believe the year 1980 marked the beginning of the turn-around. In 1990, we finally sold our home in Virginia, and the family joined me in Georgia, where we bought a new home, enrolled the kiddies in their new schools, and began our tenure as Georgians. I have lived in Georgia since moving here to take a job, in 1989, and have lived here longer than I have lived in any of the four states that have served as my permanent residences.

Which brings us to Y2K, the funkiest of the decadal years. The world did not end with the beginning of the new millenium, and life was very good, at least for a year. Then the 9/11 terrorist attack occurred, and the world changed. The year 2010 was not bad at all. I had moved to Madison, Georgia, back in 2005, and the good life here in the non-metropolitan area of Georgia was blissful.

Which brings us to 2020, and the pandemic.

The worst aspect of the year 2020 was not the virus released in the Wuhan region of China. Yes, the Wuhan Flu has been deadly, though not, perhaps, as deadly as the numbers indicate. (I recently saw an interview with a medical examiner in Michigan, I think it was, who was quite upset when she learned that the corpse on her table with the three gunshot wounds, one of which was fatal, was listed as a Covid-19 death.) But people die all the time, with or without the Wuhan Flu.

I checked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website a moment ago. According to the CDC, there have been 337,419 deaths from the coronavirus in this country. I checked on the cancer statistics, also using a link on the CDC website, which directed me to the National Cancer Institute’s website. This year there were a total of 606,520 fatalities related to cancer. The number of deaths from cancer this year is 1.8 times the number of Wuhan Flu deaths. A similar fact holds for heart disease: according to the CDC website, “About 655,000 Americans die from heart disease each year – that’s 1 in every 4 deaths.” So the number of deaths from heart disease is nearly twice the number of deaths from the Wuhan Flu.

Yes, the Wuhan Flu is deadly, and every death associated with it is a tragedy. But it isn’t the deadliest disease facing us today. It has assumed such prominence in our thinking because it has been endlessly hyped by a media that apparently finds little else interesting to report on.

Which brings us to the worst aspect of the year 2020. Because of the hype, because of the fear generated by those who report on the disease, we have voluntarily given up many of our freedoms. Governors impose lockdowns, destroying jobs, and lives, while they go about their business as if nothing has happened. People who resist are harrassed, charged, and jailed. Yet others are allowed to congregate in mobs, if the leadership of the state, or city, agrees with the mob’s objectives. It is an arbitrary and capricious rule, not by law, but by fallible humans. It is not a republican form of government, which means that it is unconstitutional. Yet we put up with it.

A friend sent a funny meme to me It was a picture of the comedian Jeff Foxworthy, whose shtick is “You may be a redneck if . . .” The caption said: “If your Democrat governor killed your small business, and you still support that same governor because you hate Donald Trump, you ain’t a redneck, because rednecks ain’t that stupid.”

If you are willing to submit to these anti-constitutional governors, I can only hope that your chains rest lightly on you.

There is some hope. I will leave you with an observation by the journalist Salena Zito. “Americans need something to aspire to — a purpose or someone who will take us to a better place. If 2020 taught us anything, it taught us that that journey upward will not come from a politician, nor will it come from the loudest voices, which means it will likely come from within us as a people. That might be the best news for 2021.”

Happy new year, everyone!

Among The Intellectualoids

First, let me confess to a bit of intellectual property theft. The American Spectator, a lively journal of opinion, used to run a monthly column with the title Among The Intellectualoids, and I have stolen that title for the title of this post. (I haven’t seen The American Spectator in awhile, so it may still run that column.)

The summer of 2020 was interesting, to say the least. The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis set off a series of protests nationwide. Some have been quite violent and costly. Apparently, the only way to atone for the death of George Floyd, caused by one human in Minneapolis, is to commit looting and pillaging on a national scale. How many 72-inch flat screen televisions does it take to atone for Floyd’s death?

We have been lectured for some time now by the intellectuals who attribute all our woes to systemic racism. What, exactly, does this mean? I once had a cat, a stray that we adopted, and at its initial vet visit, the vet informed us that the cat had ringworm, a fungal infection. We had two options for treatment: topical or systemic. What, pray tell, do those terms mean? The topical treatment was applying an ointment to the infected spot of the cat’s skin, while the systemic treatment involved a pill that entered the bloodstream, permeated the cat’s entire body, and killed the fungus wherever it was. We opted for the systemic treatment, as it would also take care of any ringworm we could not see.

So systemic racism is like that systemic ringworm treatment: it permeates the entire body. It is there whether you know it or not. You commit acts of racism daily, whether you know it or not, and your victims are maligned daily, whether they know it or not. It is in the bloodstream of our society.

This is what the intellectuals tell me. Let’s break that down a bit further: I am racist because I am a person of pallor. It does not matter that I treat everyone equally. It does not matter that acts of racism make me sick. I am not a person of color, hence I am a person of privilege, and that very fact makes me racist. I am, in short, irredeemable.

Hmm. I am defined by the color of my skin, not by my character. That sounds vaguely familiar. Wasn’t that the basis for the Jim Crow laws in the South? That sounds, well, racist.

Another area in which the intellectuals tend to get it wrong has to do with the sins of capitalism and the virtues of socialism. The intellectuals, who occupy positions of privilege in our colleges and universities, made possible by the fruits of capitalism, worship the virtues of socialism. Equality, you see, is the desired outcome.

Well, we have a perfectly socialist institution in this country, an institution that pays people the same amount of money for the jobs they do, provides the same clothing and meals to everyone, provides free health and dental care to everyone, and grants the same living accommodations to everyone. We call it prison.

The intellectuals never will understand that there is a tradeoff between freedom and equality. We are not born under equal circumstances. My parents weren’t Vanderbilts. Yet I have been free to pursue the occupations that I have enjoyed, and have no regrets that my talents and abilities did not lend themselves toward making me a wealthy man. I have done what I wanted to do. I prefer freedom to equality.

The fact that most of our intellectuals are closet, or even out-of-the-closet, Marxists, means that our college students are indoctrinated, steeped in the Marxist broth. Those students who become primary or secondary school teachers pass on what they were taught. We are all Marxists now, with apologies to Richard Nixon and John Maynard Keynes.

According to data from the Open Syllabus Project, which has reviewed something on the order of 1.1 million syllabi (over the course of a decade) from colleges and universities in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, “ranks among the top three most frequently assigned texts”. This is from Dr. Susan Berry, and it was published in a 2016 Breitbart article. In departments of economics, Marx is the most assigned economist. And why not? Marxist societies are generally recognized as utopias. We can all learn from them. (Pulled trigger warning: that was sarcasm.)

It has been my experience that Marxist writers generally use such turgid and unintelligible prose, perhaps in an attempt to hide the contorted logic behind their ideas, that they are virtually unreadable. Currently I am working on Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by the Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire. I am told it will help me understand something about systemic racism, although it is ostensibly about pedagogy. I have read only the first few pages of this work, and the only thing I have been able to gather is that the oppressor is also the oppressed. Presumably teachers oppress their students. Or the students oppress the teachers. Or something. The truth is, I have no idea what this 1968 book is about, other than the fact we are all oppressors. And all victims. I think. Compared with Marxist literature, Anna Karenina is a light-hearted comedy.

Another intellectual is Lisa Bender, the president of the Minneapolis City Council. On the Tuesday, November 10, 2020 episode of the Tucker Carlson Tonight show, a video clip aired that showed a CNN interview with Lisa Bender. It was an old clip, I think, from earlier in the summer, and the topic was the “defund” or “dismantle” the police movement. Here is the question the interviewer posed, and the answer by Lisa Bender:

Q: “Do you understand that the word ‘dismantle’ or ‘police free’ also makes some people nervous. For instance, what if, in the middle of the night, my house is broken into. Who do I call?”

A: “Yes, I mean, I, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors, and I know that myself, too, I know that comes from a place of privilege because for those of us for whom the system is working I think we need to step back and imagine what it would feel like to already live in that reality where calling the police may mean more harm is done.”

Minneapolis now lives in a different reality, one that the intellectuals didn’t see coming, but one that was predictable. However, according to Lisa Bender, intellectual, if you expect police protection as a result of the taxes you pay, you are privileged, and, of course, don’t deserve it.

Pop quiz: here are three quotations. Tell me if the author is an intellectual.

“Donald Trump is not an Adolf Hitler. At least Hitler improved the daily life of his followers, had discipline, and required more of himself to gain the respect of his followers. . . . A refusal to make comparisons has been a problem, when they have such similarities. Donald Trump’s death count is higher than Hitler’s at the same period.”

“Donald Trump is actively trying to kill our children.”

“I can only imagine the envy with which [Donald Trump] watched Derek Chauvin’s casual cruelty and monstrous indifference as he murdered George Floyd. I can only imagine that Donald wishes it had been his knee on Floyd’s neck.”

The first quote is by Bandy X. Lee, a professor at Yale University. Yale, an Ivy League school, tuition $55,500. What parent in his or her (or their) right mind(s) would pay that kind of money for this kind of drivel?

The second and third quotes are from Rob Reiner and Bette Midler, respectively. They are not intellectuals. They are intellectualoids. See how difficult it can be to separate the wheat from the chaff, when they all tend toward chaff?

My favorite George Orwell quotation is “Some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” Based on the absurd nonsense sent our way daily, it is safe to say that our world is run by intellectuals.

Robert Ray Jones

My mother was one of eight children. My father, too, was one of eight children. I am completely honest when I say that I have no idea how many cousins I have.

Of my 14 aunts and uncles by blood, there is only one I never met: Robert Ray Jones. He died eight years before I was born, just about 30 days or so after D-Day. My mother was 14 years old when her older brother died, and along about 1998 or 1999, the fact that his body was never found began preying on her mind. His name is engraved on a wall in the Brittany American Cemetery in Saint-James, Normandy, France, and there is a marker in the family cemetery in just outside Kenly, NC, but as his body was never found, there is no grave.

Unfortunately, there are only two of my mother’s siblings still alive: her twin brother George, and the baby of the family, my Aunt Lorraine. I love my Aunt Lorraine dearly, and would thus never be so crass as to reveal her age, but suffice it to say, both have a few years in the rearview mirror. And so it is that bits and pieces of the family history are being lost.

According to my mother (and this was late in life, so the recollections may be faulty), the last family member to see Robert alive was my Uncle Roy, who saw him in England just prior to the D-Day invasion. Alas, my Uncle Roy is no longer around to confirm this story. But it may explain why he named his son, my cousin, Robert. According to my Aunt Lorraine, Robert was “blown up” during actions in northern France subsequent to the invasion, and that is why there was no body. Another family tale had it that the family buried a casket in the family cemetery that contained nothing but his dog tags. That story does not ring true for many reasons: would the family really go to that extraordinary expense during a time of fiscal hardship; when did the government start returning dog tags (note the plural) to families; and if Robert truly was “blown up” to the point that no body was available for burial, how did the dog tags survive?

Before going further, I should note what I think I know of dog tags, based on my viewing of many, many World War II television shows during the 1960s. My understanding is that each GI wore two dog tags, giving his name, serial number, date of tetanus toxoid inoculation, blood type, and religion (P for Protestant, C for Catholic, H for Hebrew). There was no + or – for Rhesus blood factor. Up until 1943, the name and address of next of kin was included, but that was later removed from the dog tag, as it could be used to mentally torture any GI who was captured. One dog tag was worn on a chain around the neck, the other on a chain around the neck chain. If a soldier died in battle, the second dog tag was pulled and kept until the death of the soldier could be recorded officially, while the first stayed with the soldier, so that the burial detail could identify the victim that was being buried.

In 1999, I went with my mother, my father, one of my daughters, and about nine or so other relatives and family friends to the Brittany American Cemetery, where we saw Robert’s name engraved on a wall, and generally enjoyed the peacefulness of this wonderful place, filled with close to 5,000 graves, including some 500 or so unknowns. It brought some peace to my mother.

All that is background. Now, on to the story.

I have an Ancestry.com account primarily for Kathy, who enjoys doing a little genealogical work from time to time. I don’t remember my log-in information, so it really is an account for her. In other words, I am not Mr. Genealogy. My sister, though, is Mrs. Genealogy, and she is quite active on Ancestry. Through her activities, we have discovered four cousins we were previously unaware of. I gather she has been building a family tree on Ancestry, or something similar to that, because one day she received a communication through Ancestry, asking about Robert Jones. The gentleman who contacted her lives in Seattle, Washington, and he asked for Robert’s serial number. My Aunt Lorraine has that information, and when my sister transmitted that information to him, he sent her a picture of Robert’s dog tag, pictured above.

Oh, man, do we have questions!

But as of now, we have no definitive answers, so there will, I hope, be a part two to this post. It seems that an elderly French woman had the dog tag in her possession, and our Seattle, Washington contact came to know of it through friends who live in northern France and know the woman. The woman has had it for many years. Did she know my uncle? Where is the other dog tag? Does she know what happened to the body?

For now, this is an unfinished story. I will keep you posted, if any more information comes to light.

Isn’t technology grand?

Barratry, Champerty, and Maintenance

How old were you when you learned the meaning of the word “Mommy”? Where were you when you learned the meaning of the word “paradigm”? When we are young, our brains are like little sponges, absorbing all we see and hear. After that, we learn a bit more slowly, and we tend to remember the circumstances under which we learn something new. I don’t remember when I learned the meaning of the word “baseball” but I remember, to within a few months, when I learned the meanings of the words “barratry” and “champerty”.

Sam Ervin Jr. became a United States Senator from the state of North Carolina, my home state, when I was a bit more than a year and a half old, and retired during my senior year in college, some 20 years, five months, and 20 days after taking the oath of office. He was born in 1896, a mere 19 ½ years after the end of Reconstruction, an event that made Ervin and most of his generation of fellow North Carolinians Democrats. He was the product of his time. Like many orators of his age, he knew his King James Bible and his Shakespeare, but he also knew funny tales of his fellow man. He belonged to a political species that is now extinct: the conservative Democrat.

Most people my age who have heard of Senator Sam know him from the Watergate hearings, as he chaired the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (aka, the Senate Watergate Committee). Those of us who grew up with Sam Ervin Jr. as our senator had the opportunity to hear him speak, and to marvel at his elegance with words. Once, when giving a Confederate Memorial Day address, I even stole from Senator Sam, referring to our honored dead as having descended into “the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust”. I did not know at the time that he had stolen that line from Robert G. Ingersoll, but that does not matter. If I had not heard the Senator use that phrase, regardless of its origin, it would have been lost to me.

He could tell a funny story, as well. These tales are generally not knee-slippers, but were used to make a point. There is the story of George, a teen-aged youth, who was hired to remove the weeds and briars from the grave of a dead relative of his employer. George started his work, but then suddenly burst out laughing so hard that he could no longer finish his work. “What are you laughing about,” his employer asked. “Boss,” he said, “I’m laughing at them funny words on this gravestone.” “George, I don’t see any funny words on the gravestone.” “Look here, Boss,” replied George. “It says ‘not dead but sleeping’. He ain’t fooling anybody but himself.”

After serving on the Watergate Committee and achieving his moment of national fame, he retired to his home in Morgantown, NC, and wrote his memoirs. The problem is that he let a few too many years pass between his moment of fame (1974) and the publication of his memoirs (1984). With Watergate 10 years in the rear-view mirror, and with the Reagan Revolution in full swing, he seemed a quaint but not very interesting bit of the past. He had trouble finding a publisher. He ended up having the book published by The Michie Company, a publishing firm in Charlottesville Virginia, which handled the state of Virginia’s legal publishing (annotated state statutes, state agency publications, and, as Wikipedia puts it, “other reference publications used by the legal profession”). I can’t imagine that Michie had the budget to promote the book that, say, a Simon and Schuster would have had, but there you have it. Timing is everything in this business.

I bought the book in early 1985, and in a chapter entitled “Illustrative Judicial Aberrations” I found a reference to a 1963 Supreme Court ruling in the case of NAACP v. Button, in which the Supreme Court “held that the First Amendment rights of freedom of expression and association prohibited Virginia from prosecuting the NAACP and its attorneys for violating its laws against barratry, champerty, and maintenance”.

Barratry, champerty, and maintenance?

I didn’t have the internet in 1985, so I was limited to what my dictionary contained. The closest word I could find to “barratry” was “barracking,” a rough synonym for heckling or abusing. A friend, who is a patent attorney, later loaned me a copy of a legal dictionary, where I determined that “barratry” was “litigation for the purpose of harassment”, what I think we would call today the “frivolous lawsuit”.

Champerty is something else. Let’s take a hypothetical situation. Let’s say Tim Cook is President of the United States, and is no longer the big boss at Apple, but he still has shares of Apple, from which he can profit if Apple does well. Let’s say a foreign dignitary buys a MacBook Air. I decide that constitutes an emolument. Yes, I know, money was exchanged for a product or service, and not given as a gift, so it can’t be an emolument, but go along with me on this one. I decide I don’t like President Cook, so I file a lawsuit, claiming he violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. I don’t expect the suit to go anywhere, as it clearly has no basis, but it will harass and generally incommode President Cook. I have engaged in barratry.

But let us stipulate further that I really don’t have the money to go through with the suit. I find a sugar daddy, another person who dislikes President Cook, and who will be happy to see him inconvenienced. Sugar Daddy pays for the suit, and we both enjoy the spoils. Sugar Daddy has engaged in maintenance, and if there is a monetary reward at the end of the case in which he shares, Sugar Daddy has also engaged in champerty.

So why did these archaic terms come to mind? Last night, at a bit after 9:00, I found myself in my pickup, in the metropolis of Rutledge, Georgia (population 820). I remembered it was debate night, so I flipped on the radio to listen to the debate during my 10 minutes ride home. After a few minutes the word “barratry” formed in my mind. I was not remembering the actual definition, but my early guess at the definition, back before I borrowed that legal dictionary: the act of abusing. Stereo barracking.

I arrived home, and turned on a humorous podcast (Kimmer Show podcast: check it out.) I hope this election ends soon.

It’s A Slow Read

When I moved to Madison, Georgia, I signed up for cable television, primarily because there was only one television station that I could pick up with an antenna. That station happened to be a Spanish-speaking UHF station out of Athens, and I do not speak Spanish. [The one thing I noticed about that television station is that every program, whether it be the news, the weather, a game show, a sitcom, a drama, whatever, featured at least one scantily clad, buxom young lass.] After subscribing to cable for a couple of months, I decided that I would be better off without television. At that point, reading became my number one hobby.

It quickly became apparent that my reading speed was terribly slow. I believe my reading speed peaked while I was in high school, and began a slow decline thereafter. One cannot spend decades reading scientific papers without suffering a decline in reading speed. It simply isn’t possible to read scientific papers very quickly. To be honest, I’m surprised my lips don’t move when I read. Still, given that the television set was off, I had several hours every night to devote to reading, and I managed to read a lot of books. For a couple of years I averaged reading one book per week, which is a pretty good clip for a slow reader.

This is the month of September, the ninth month, and I have managed to read exactly eight books thus far this year. If I can manage to finish the one I am currently working on, A History of Georgia (Kenneth Coleman, Editor, 1977), within the next two weeks, I will be zooming along at the pace of one book per month. And to make matters worse, two of the books I read this year were actually books I’d read earlier.

The book on Georgia history is taking a very, very long time to read, because I am easily distracted. Back during the summer, while working on the Beaufort, SC house, I was reading the portions of the book that dealt with the Trustee and the Royal Province periods of Georgia history, and I was surprised to see the town of Beaufort, SC show up prominently in Georgia’s early history. I soon focused on Fort Frederick, the fort where Oglethorpe and his band of settlers stopped before making their way to what is today Savannah. Fort Frederick, I soon discovered, was transferred by the United States to the State of South Carolina, which has it listed as a heritage site. There it sits, on the river (well, partly in the river), between Beaufort and Port Royal, and I had to go see the place.

Problem: it isn’t open to the general public. I spent a couple of days trying to figure out how to get to the fort without trespassing on private property or getting arrested by the Navy. (It appears that the easiest access to the fort can be had if I slip over the fence and the concertina wire surrounding the US Navy hospital there.) So I still haven’t seen Fort Frederick, and the two days I spent trying to get there certainly slowed my reading speed considerably.

Last month it was Fort Frederick. Yesterday afternoon it was Penfield, Georgia. I am now up to the immediate antebellum days in Georgia’s history, and the book is reviewing the state of higher education in Georgia just prior to the war. I knew, of course, that Emory University, now in Atlanta, began as Oxford College just outside Covington. I did not know that Oglethorpe University, now in Brookhaven, used to be located just south of Milledgeville, but that does not come as a total surprise, given that Milledgeville was once the state capitol. But I was shocked to learn that Mercer University began life in the little community of Penfield, Georgia, located some 26 miles from my house, over in Greene County.

As far as I can tell, Penfield never had a city charter, and has always been a farming community.

According to Google maps, there is a place in the community that either makes yarn or sells yarn to the public (Google maps isn’t all that clear). And that is it. Google maps show no other businesses, not even a gasoline station. It is a funny place for a university.

Like my alma mater, Mercer University began life as a Baptist college. (My alma mater is no longer associated with the North Carolina Baptist Convention. I am not sure about Mercer’s relationship today with the Georgia Baptist Association.) Josiah Penfield donated some land for the college in 1833, and hence the school was located in the community of Penfield. This lasted only a few years. In 1871, Mercer moved to Macon, and the school’s Penfield properties were donated. The Penfield Baptist Church received the school’s chapel, and the academic building became the Penfield public school building.

So, yesterday afternoon, in the middle of part three of the book, I drove to Penfield to see the remains of history for myself. It took a mere two hours to get through page 176. My reading speed is terrible.

Losing My Grip

I have my grandfather’s bolt action 12 gauge shotgun. It holds only three shells, two in the magazine and one in the chamber. If I remember correctly from my quail hunting days, this is the maximum number of shells allowed for hunting migratory game birds. That shotgun has been in every residence I’ve lived in since graduating. The reason is simple: the shotgun is probably the very best home defense weapon there is.

When children lived in the house, I had the shotgun mounted on a rack over the master bedroom door. Now that the kiddies are out of the house, I keep it under my side of the bed. I do not leave a shell in the chamber: I figure that any home invader with a minimal number of active brain cells will, upon hearing the bolt of that shotgun being worked, decide that there must be some easier home to invade. I sincerely hope that is true: I’m not that good at repairing drywall.

My father died in 2001, and a few years after his death I ended up with his pistol. That was the very first pistol I ever owned. It was not exactly a fine piece. The Armi Galesi 25 ACP has mixed reviews these days. I’m pretty sure the reviews were not all that great when my Dad purchased this pistol in 1959. (Then again, there was no internet in 1959.) The war had been over for about 14 years, and I’m not sure that the Italian manufacturing sector had recovered its quality standards by that time. I deemed the pistol unreliable because of the number of jams and misfeeds I encountered.

Because of my experience with that one semi-automatic weapon, I became a revolver man. Don’t write in and tell me that revolvers can fail: I know that, and I also know that revolver failures tend to be catastrophic. However, failure of that sort is very rare, much, much, much rarer that the rate of misfeeding or jamming with a semi-automatic. If you own a pistol for self defense, it is counter productive to own one that jams frequently.

The first pistol I purchased (a revolver, of course) was the Taurus Judge Public Defender. The Judge is an excellent pistol for self defense. It is chambered to hold either 45 caliber long Colts, or 410 gauge shotgun shells. Mine is loaded with three shells (triple aught buckshot), followed by two 45 long Colts. The upside is that this pistol has serious stopping power. There are two downsides: it holds only five rounds, and it is very, very heavy.

I bought an inexpensive Blackhawk hip holster for the Judge, which was a mistake. Now, Blackhawk makes very good, affordable holsters. I own several, and am pleased with all of the others. But the Judge is so heavy and bulky that it requires a little more support than the Blackhawk offered. The Blackhawk shoulder holster worked well, but I don’t often wear a jacket, especially in summer, so the shoulder holster was not a solution to my problem. Finally, quite recently in fact, I found the perfect holster for the Judge, which means that it has once again become my everyday carry piece. I heartily recommend Wright Leather Works LLC. Their holsters are hand made, and are the products of true craftsmen. My Predator pancake style outside the waistband holster has made the Judge a comfortable piece to carry.

Before obtaining the proper holster, I decided that the Judge should be relegated to the house for home defense (or to the car for protection on long trips), and that I needed a less heavy, more comfortable everyday carry weapon. A little research pointed me to the Smith and Wesson Model 642 .38 Special +P. This is a much lighter pistol than the Judge, but it still has serious stopping power. It shares the same downside: only five rounds. But this pistol is small enough to be carried inside the waistband, which I do, with a Kydex holster.

A funny aside: when the .38 Special became my everyday carry weapon, I decided that it would be wise to buy slacks that were a couple of inches bigger than my waist, in order to accommodate the bulk of the pistol. Sometime after that, daughter Reilly asked me my waist size. (She must have been doing birthday or Christmas shopping.) I gave her my new size, which was met with a moment of silence, followed by “We’ve chunked up a bit, haven’t we?”

I wish I could say that the .38 Special made me completely happy, but the truth is I was still bothered by the fact that it held only five rounds. I’m a pretty good shot, at the range, but I understand that under duress, with adrenaline flooding my system, I’m probably going to miss a few shots. That’s not so good when you have only five. I began looking for a backup pistol, a small one. Based on the advice of a knowledgeable friend, I settled on the Kel Tec P3AT. Yes, not only did I actually buy a semi-automatic, but I bought one with a polymer frame.

I am glad I did. It is a great little gun. It uses .380 ACP ammunition, which was good enough for James Bond. It is very light (8.3 ounces). It holds seven rounds. It fits neatly into a Blackhawk Size 1 pocket holster or an ankle holster. There is only one problem.

I am losing my grip.

Semi-automatic pistols usually have a slide that must be racked in order to put a bullet in the chamber. That requires a firm grip, and sad to say, I’m losing mine. As I am right handed, I would normally rack the slide with my left hand, but in order to rack the slide of the P3AT, I have to transfer it to my left hand, rack the slide with my right, then either shoot left handed or transfer the pistol back to my right hand. That is not something I want to do under duress.

There are pistols that are easy to rack, the Walther PK380, for example. I believe a three year old has sufficient power in its grip to rack that slide. Unfortunately, that does not apply to the P3AT.

But technology is wonderful, and a very low tech solution to this problem has been found by a company called ArachniGRIP. They sell the Slide Spider, which is essentially a piece of “skateboard tape” laser cut to fit over the grasping grooves of the slide. The surface of the tape is rough, which improves your ability to grip the slide.

Or so they say. I ordered mine today, and it will be a few days before I can try it. If it doesn’t work, I will let you know.

With summer nearing an end, I will have to stop wearing the Hawaiian shirts that cover the Judge, and go back to the .38 Special as an everyday carry. But the P3AT will still be on me, somewhere.

So Long, Ron

I recently received word that a friend of mine, who moved away from the area a few years ago, had died. His name was Ron Daughtry, and we had a few adventures together. He died of pneumonia, not related to the Wuhan Flu, which is of little comfort to his widow and other loved ones. Still, it reminds us that people die every day of other illnesses. He was way too young. I figure he was around 80 at the time of his passing.

I was thinking of Ron even before his death, primarily because I was thinking of the newspaper article I published around one of our misadventures. I was thinking of the article because I am in the process of planning a similar, though unrelated, excursion. I will have to do this one alone.

The article that follows was published in the Morgan County Citizen in August of 2010. I entitled the article “In Search of Elizabeth Lumpkin,” but I think the newspaper changed the title to something else.

The photograph you see above is one I took with an early digital camera. (Ron is the fellow in red shirt that you see in the photo.) The quality is not very good. Before publishing the article, the newspaper sent me back to the grave site with their photographer, and she took several high quality photos. Unfortunately, the newspaper’s website does not include articles from 10 years ago, so I couldn’t use their photos. This caused me to search for any photograph of the grave that I could find. I couldn’t find a single photo, but I did run across a master’s degree thesis from the University of Georgia, in 2012, which made reference to the following article in a footnote. I truly have become a footnote to history.

In Search of Elizabeth Lumpkin

I blame my friend.

My friend loaned me a copy of the book “Rambles Through Morgan County, Georgia” by Louise McHenry Hickey (1971, reprinted 1989), and in reading this book I discovered that Elizabeth Lumpkin is buried in our fair county.

Elizabeth Lumpkin, who died at age 33 in the year 1819, was the first wife of Wilson Lumpkin, a man who held several important public offices during his life, including that of governor of the state of Georgia (1831 – 1835). Elizabeth Lumpkin is just the sort of minor historical figure that intrigues me, and so I decided to visit her grave.

It is interesting to visit the graves of the famous, and I’ve visited my share, but the graves of the nearly famous can be just as rewarding. I value a photograph of the grave of Ottmar Mergenthaler that I took in the late 1970s or early 1980s, in Baltimore. Once upon a time school children learned about Mergenthaler and his invention, and I suspect that even today newspaper publishers of a certain age still recall fondly the inventor of the Linotype machine. He is no longer famous, but still intriguing.

And so it is with Elizabeth Lumpkin. She married a future governor, gave him children, lost three in infancy, and died young. Best of all, she is buried nearby. I had to see her grave. The problem was finding the grave.

Mrs. Hickey was not very helpful. Here is her description of the grave’s location, in its entirety:

“Some miles out from Madison and Rutledge, on the Centennial road, and then turning off on an old but seldom used road today, and into a forest of tall, whispering pines, that makes one gasp, ‘this is the forest primeval,’ we suddenly came to an old rock chimney of a burned house. And a few yards further on, treading over a floor of pine needles, through tangled vines and overgrowth, among the shadowy trees, we found the moss covered tomb, a square kind of vault, several feet high, built of rocks. Inserted in one side is a marble slab with the following inscription, which dates back to an epoch of Georgia history: ‘Sacred to the memory of Mrs. Elizabeth Lumpkin and three infant children, being the wife and sons of Wilson Lumpkin. Mrs. Lumpkin died November 30, 1819 in the 33rd year of her age. Beloved and lamented by her family and friends. She lived the life and died the death of the righteous.’”

A few minutes spent with Google Earth will convince most anyone that the grave cannot be near Centennial Road. This is a problem with portions of Mrs. Hickey’s book: the book is a collection of articles, some dating back to the 1940s, and a few street and road names have changed during the years. We know, for example, that Old Post Road was once South First Street, and that Academy Street was once South Second Street. Clearly, the Centennial Road that we know is not the Centennial Road that Mrs. Hickey knew. Either that, or the seldom used road that she described is a very, very long dirt road that has been obliterated with time.

During this phase of my research I happened upon a Cemetery Survey of Morgan County, dated 2007, posted on the county’s website. Each cemetery is marked with a fairly large cross on a not-very-detailed county map. In most cases, the lack of detail is not a problem. For example, it is not difficult to find the Mars Hill Church Cemetery using the survey map, given that the cross is shown near US Highway 278, and there is a Mars Hill Church Road intersecting US Highway 278. But the cross that marks the location of the “Elizabeth Lumpkin Cemetery” is in the middle of a cluster of parcels of land off Davis Academy Road, and there is not a landmark, such as a road, that can be used to fix the location of the grave.

I drove along Davis Academy Road until I was fairly convinced that I knew where to begin. The most likely location was a parcel for sale, accessible by what appeared to be nothing more than a logging trail. I guessed that the grave would be found somewhere on that parcel. But, given the fact that there really wasn’t a road there, I decided that it would be a good idea to enlist the aid of a like-minded but more experienced partner. So, I contacted Ron Daughtry, retired timber buyer, and a man who had spent years hiking along logging trails, and in a moment of insanity, he agreed to join me on this quest. Ron called the realtor who listed the property, and obtained permission to hike in and search for the grave. And so it came to pass that on one hot, humid Saturday morning we plunged into the woods, in search of Elizabeth Lumpkin.

We did not find the grave that day, but we did find the remains of her house, the stone fireplace that Mrs. Hickey described. The grave was supposed to be near the house, but we were not sure just what Mrs. Hickey considered to be “near.” We decided that asking the county for help in finding the grave was the reasonable thing to do.

A very nice lady at the county sent me an aerial photo of the area we had hiked, showing the division of the land into numbered parcels, and locating the grave with a red dot. It was not on the parcel we had received permission to explore. Unfortunately, according to the photo, we had already strayed onto this parcel, and so it was time to contact another property owner for permission.

The owner of this second parcel gave us permission to explore his land, and said that he recalled seeing the grave, some 25 years earlier. He believed that Elizabeth Lumpkin was not buried on his land, but that is not what the county indicated. We decided to go with the county’s aerial photo, given that it was more recent. In the process I called the owner of an adjacent parcel, which contained a road of sorts that might run near the grave. I left messages, but didn’t hear from him before our second plunge into the woods.

The county was wrong. Ron and I spent more than two hours exploring nearly every square foot of that parcel of land, and we did not find the grave. The owner was probably correct: the actual location of the grave must be south-southwest of the spot marked by the county, on yet another parcel of land.

Sometime after this second adventure, land owner number three, the fellow who owns the road, returned my call. Yes, he knew the location of the grave. It was on his land, near the road, south-southwest of the spot marked by the county. He agreed to show it to us. We met him, drove up his dirt road, and within 50 yards from where we stopped our trucks we saw the grave of Elizabeth Lumpkin.

This owner does a very nice job of maintaining her grave. The county had an old photo, showing a tree growing out of the walled grave. The owner had cut the tree down, and he periodically cleans up the area.

Elizabeth Lumpkin rests in a quiet, beautiful spot, cared for by a land owner who shows respect for the departed. I almost felt guilty, disturbing the tranquility of these surroundings.

And so our visit to the grave of Elizabeth Lumpkin was far from a simple drive to the cemetery. It was a detective story followed by a treasure hunt, which kept us occupied for three or four weeks. And for that, I blame my friend, the one who loaned me Mrs. Hickey’s book.

I haven’t revealed the exact location of the grave for a couple of reasons. First, I never asked the owner of the land for permission to use his name. It doesn’t seem right to disturb his peace and quiet by putting a score or more of grave hunters on his trail. Second, it seems a shame to disturb the tranquility of Elizabeth’s resting place. When she was buried, her grave was near a major north-south stagecoach line, but the stagecoach hasn’t run in awhile, and our paved roads have passed her by. It is quiet there now. Let her slumber in peace.

But, if you decide that you really must visit her grave, then by all means, do so. I have provided enough hints in this article for you to find the grave, and just in case that doesn’t work, I’ve given approximate coordinates for the grave to the county. It will require some work on your part, and for that you, too, can blame my friend.

Here Endeth The Lesson

It still sticks in my craw, 16 or 17 years after the event. I can feel my cheeks turning red as I write this. But it happened, and I am here to tell you about it.

I had taken one of my daughters out for a birthday dinner, and was returning her home to her mother. I was probably no more than two miles from her house in DeKalb County, when I made the left turn that took me past the liquor store, a fairly busy place just off a road with a 45 miles per hour speed limit. The 1980s model car with Gwinnett County plates pulled out in front of me, from the parking lot of the liquor store, and proceeded to move at the amazing speed of about 15 miles per hour. I’ve seen that move before: I’ve used that move before. Drink a little too much, and you worry about getting pulled over, so your natural reaction is to drive slowly and carefully. But your perception is warped, so you find yourself pulled over because you are driving 30 miles per hour below the speed limit. “Oh, great,” I thought, “I’ve got to follow this drunk for the next couple of miles?”

I did what I normally did in that situation (which, by the way, I no longer do): I pulled up close to the car’s back end, hoping that having me on his tail would encourage him to pick up the pace a bit. It didn’t work. A short space up the road, I needed take a right hand turn. I thought that maybe, just maybe, he would go straight. He didn’t. He slowed down to make the right hand turn, then came to a complete stop in the middle of the road. I nearly ended up in his back seat. I’m not sure how I managed not to rear-end him.

His driver’s side door opened, and I began mentally kicking myself for having removed the baseball bat from the back seat floor of the car. Then I saw the gun on his hip.

The gun was like an eye-magnet. I was focused on that pistol like a radar beam focused on an airplane. It was only a second later that I saw the police uniform. The fellow in front of me, who had pulled out of the liquor store parking lot and was driving slowly, like a drunk, was an off-duty DeKalb County policeman, on his way home to Gwinnett County. He closed his door and moved slowly back to my car.

This was not my idea of a good end to a very nice evening. I kept trying to figure out what to do. It was apparent he had been drinking. Should I call 911 for another police officer? Would another police officer uphold the law, or protect his brother? And what about my daughter, sitting in the passenger seat? What lesson would I be teaching her? And did I really want her to see her father taken away in handcuffs?

In the end, I did nothing. As I recall, he did not ask for my license, a good move as he was off-duty and a bit under the weather. He gave me a very hard time about following him too closely. He berated me and generally made me feel about two inches tall. It was humiliating, especially occurring as it did in front of my daughter. I wanted to ask him if he had witnessed a car driven like his, suddenly hitting the brakes in an effort to cause an accident, would he have given that driver a ticket? But I didn’t. Discretion was the better part of valor.

Eventually he returned to his car and drove off slowly. I gave him plenty of room. I didn’t want him to see where my daughter lived, so I sat there for awhile before returning her to her home.

That man had issues.

Three or four months later, I heard a radio newscast that described a DeKalb County policeman who had been arrested in a mall parking lot. Apparently he lost his temper with someone in the parking lot, and proceeded to damage the other fellow’s car. I really would like to think that it was my off-duty, tipsy policeman from that night a few months earlier. I will never know, of course, but I think that if he lost his job and his pension, it would only be his just desserts.

But, as the title of this post suggests, there is a lesson here. I am writing this, still feeling somewhat humiliated, 16 or 17 years after the fact. I can write this because I did not die that evening. I wanted to castigate that officer, I wanted another policeman present to give him a field sobriety test, I wanted to do something. The fact that I didn’t do anything that I wanted to do means he did not have the excuse to pull out a baton, or a Taser, or, the worst in my book, his service pistol. And so I lived.

I don’t give advice, but I will share with you my rules, which have never failed. Never try to hit or otherwise attack a policeman. Never talk back to a policeman. Never try to run from a policeman. Never, never, never make a move in front of a policeman that even remotely resembles pulling a weapon. Just shut up and take it. You can always file a civil suit and try to get justice in a court of law.

You can then look forward to the rest of your life on earth, even if it is tinged with occasional bouts of remembered humiliation.

Shortages

Back in March, the shortages of toilet paper and paper towels made the news. These shortages have been alleviated, or so it appears, as the shelves in our local Ingles and Wal Mart are once again full of paper products. But I am surprised at the other shortages I have encountered.

A nice, new, white shirt suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune after a spaghetti dinner one night. The stain proved stubborn, and my usual bag of stain-removing tricks appeared not to be working, so I consulted that know-it-all, Mr. Internet. Mr. Internet suggested that I try Dawn Dish-Washing Liquid. Now, I was skeptical that any one brand of cleaner would be significantly better than any other brand, but I was also desperate, so I trudged off to Ingles to discover that, while there were several bottles of dish-washing detergent on the shelves, the Dawn was all gone. I finally found a bottle – one bottle – at Wal Mart. Why the run on Dawn? It didn’t remove the offending stain, so I am a bit surprised that it is in short supply.

Kathy and I spent some time at the shooting range recently, which is another story of shortages. I keep weapons for the purpose of self defense, so it makes sense that I keep several hundred rounds of self defense ammunition, i.e., hollow points, on hand at all times. Hollow points are more expensive than standard bullets, and are wasted on the range, so when we go to practice, I end up buying target rounds for our pistols.

Not this time.

I had enough target rounds in 45 caliber, 38 special, and 25 caliber to get a good workout, but I didn’t have a single target round of 380 caliber. This is a problem, as Kathy and I both own 380s, so we go through a fair number of rounds when we practice. The real problem occurred when we tried to buy some: the range was completely sold out. The recent turmoil has caused demand for ammunition to skyrocket. When the stores ran out of hollow points, they sold target ammo. And now, the target ammo is depleted.

We practiced with our other weapons, and at the end of the day, I made a run to another range in another town. I was able to purchase a box of 250 target rounds in 380 caliber. We went back to the range the next day, and brushed up on our 380s. But it is surprising when you can’t even buy target rounds.

And so it goes. I have a nice matching pen and pencil set, and the pen’s ink cartridge needed replacing. I went to the store to buy a cartridge, and came home empty handed. The store sold the pens still, but there was not a single ink replacement cartridge for my pen, indeed, for ANY new pen the store sold. I had to order it on Amazon.

It continues. I tried to order a set of DVDs for a British television comedy I used to watch in the 1970s. Everybody advertised it, but when I tried to put it in my shopping cart, the vile words “temporarily out of stock” came up, on every website. I finally found a second-hand set of DVDs, and probably paid too much for it.

We have enjoyed cooking during the past few months, but it became painfully obvious that a really nice, really sharp, set of kitchen knives would enhance our cooking experience. A student of mine was selling a very nice set, and we bought it. Apparently the month of June was a good month for this knife manufacturer, as it was two weeks before the knives could be shipped.

There isn’t an N-95 mask for sale in the entire county.

The King Of All Shortages story follows, and it involves a refrigerator. Our refrigerator came with the house that I bought 14 years ago. The ice maker stopped working last year, and it began leaking water periodically. Neither worried me: I don’t need ice very often, and a towel shoved under the front of the fridge took care of the leak. Kathy didn’t quite see it that way, and so I finally relented and said, “Okay, go get a new fridge.” She went everywhere: Costco, Home Depot, Lowes, a local appliance store, and even an appliance store up in Asheville. Just deciding on one model was a royal pain: why are there so bloody many options? Why do refrigerators need computers? Why on earth should I connect a refrigerator, of all things, to WiFi?

At every place, the same thing happened. She decided, finally, on a model, only to be told that it was not in stock. I can’t tell you how many times this happened, but it stopped being funny a long time ago.

At long last, Lowes had a model she wanted, and it was in stock. She paid for it, and it was scheduled to be delivered on Thursday. On Wednesday they called to say that, unfortunately, they sold the refrigerator to someone else, and that it had been delivered already. That didn’t sit very well, given that she had paid for the thing the week before. Kathy grabbed her bag, hopped in her car, and drove to Lowes. She was gone for a couple of hours of quality, bonding time with local Lowes management.

The next day, the refrigerator pictured above was delivered to the house.

I don’t know why everything seems to be in such short supply these days. In some cases, it is probably due to our trade disagreements with China. Even our “Made in America” refrigerators use parts manufactured in China. But in other cases, such as the ammunition shortage, China is not the problem. I am not accustomed to shortages, and do not want to get used to them.

Here I Come To Save The Day!

Last Saturday we had to make a quick, unscheduled trip to Asheville. The last time I made that trip I was by myself, and it was snowing. I saw a truck spin out in front of me just above Commerce, GA, and by the time I hit Rabun Gap, I was in four-wheel-drive. This time, Kathy was with me, which explains why, despite the fact that the weather was lovely and I never had to slow down to go into four-wheel-drive, it still took longer than my “Nanook of the North” trip.

We traveled up on Saturday afternoon, and were back home in Georgia by Sunday afternoon. I did all the driving, and the truth of the matter is that the trip was made tougher by the fact that we were not making good time. “Thou shalt make good time” is my 11th commandment. At any rate, we finally returned home, and I decided to reward myself with my favorite in-between-meals snack of a fresh, unopened box of Cheez-Its. Like a good addict, I always keep one in the pantry. When I grabbed the box, I saw the unevenly-edged hole in the top of the box.

We have a mouse, and the little varmint is eating my Cheez-Its! This means war!

We live within the city limits of Madison, but Madison is not a booming metropolis. You may recall seeing the photos of our late dog Ronnie with the cows that graze in the pasture behind our house, a pasture that is also within the city limits of Madison. Recently I read that the population density in either New York City, or in the borough of Manhattan (I can’t remember which it was, sorry), is something like 26,000 people per square mile. As of the 2019 census update, our entire county doesn’t have 26,000 people. In fact, we don’t yet have 20,000 people. So it is not surprising that we occasionally meet up with creatures a bit further down the evolutionary chain.

I am, as a general rule, pretty tolerant of wildlife. On the first day that I moved into this house, a fairly large black snake wandered through the backyard, and I had to restrain Ronnie from chasing the creature. One still lives under the steps to our back deck. Harry, the lizard on the television show Death In Paradise, would not be lonely at all were he to move to our house. I haven’t given them names, but there are several. Every now and again, one makes it into the house, and we have to jump through hoops to get it out of the house without injury. About three weeks ago, after mowing the weeds in my yard, I stripped down to enjoy a refreshing shower when I noticed a young snake stretched out along the baseboard next to the shower in the master bathroom. With some difficulty I moved it onto the blade of a round - point shovel, took it out the front door, and released it into the yard.

So you see, when it comes to wildlife, I’m a live-and-let-live guy. But this mouse is eating my Cheez-Its, and that crosses the line.

I bought six large glue boards from Lowes, placed a dollop of peanut butter in the center of the boards, and scattered them throughout the house, including my office. About 15 minutes later, when I returned to my office, I noticed that the peanut butter was gone. I reloaded the trap, and a bit later, the peanut butter was gone. It dawned on me that Lucy, the 90-pound puppy, who loves peanut butter, was making life difficult for me.

A bit later, I opened the pantry door, and there he was: a tiny little thing, probably not even two inches long. I couldn’t get to him (I’m not going to reach in and grab anything that has teeth), but I made lots of noise and watched him scurry off.

You know that little warming compartment under the oven, the drawer where you store all your cookie sheets and whatnot? I cleaned that out, and placed a glue board there. When I opened the drawer to check on it, I was astounded: the peanut butter was gone, and there were little bitty mouse footprints on the board. This little creature had traversed the glue, eaten the peanut butter, and gone back. It must have been a mighty struggle. From this point on, the mouse had a name: Mighty Mouse.

Finally – FINALLY – one of the glue boards worked. I opened the pantry, and there he was, struggling to get his two hind feet off the glue board. His front two feet were clear of the board, and his two back feet were close to being free of the sticky mess. It was time to act. I grabbed the board, and started to peel off a kitchen garbage bag. It was trash day, and the board and mouse were going into the bag, and subsequently into the trash can. You may think that cruel, but this is the mouse that ate my Cheez-Its.

I was out the kitchen door, out of the garage, and heading down the drive to the trash can when Kathy called out to me. She is a sensitive soul, and she was imploring me to release the mouse in the wild. Why, I asked, so that he can return and eat my Cheez-Its? While we were having this conversation, Mighty Mouse, finally pulled free of the glue board, and found himself sticking to the outside of the plastic trash bag. (Thanks to Kathy’s intervention, I hadn’t quite put the board in the bag.) But he didn’t stick there for very long. With a great heave-ho, he pulled free of the trash bag, dropped to the driveway, and promptly RAN BACK INTO THE GARAGE!

We were of two minds. Kathy figured he had his fill of our household, and would run away. I figured he would stick around. If I were a mouse, living in a house with Cheez-Its, I would stick around. We kept the garage door open for awhile, just so he could leave if he wished.

The next morning, we found mouse droppings – larger mouse droppings. Either Mighty Mouse is truly mighty, or he has a partner. I supplemented the glue boards with good, old-fashioned Victor Model M032 wooden mousetraps baited with cheese. And today, at 6:01 AM, Mighty Mouse’s partner met his maker.

I’ve always heard the quote “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” There is no better mousetrap than the good, old-fashioned wooden ones with kill bars.

And now, two recorded treats. The first is the original theme song from Mighty Mouse (1958), performed by the Mitch Miller Orchestra (remember “Sing Along With Mitch”?) with vocals by The Terrytooners; and the second is the comic genius, Andy Kaufman, doing the Mighty Mouse Theme Song on Saturday Night Live. This is one of the two funniest skits ever on SNL, the other being Bob and Ray singing “If you want my body and you think I’m sexy, come on, Sugar, tell me so.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJvM8eYcpL0

https://vimeo.com/groups/326115/videos/141371878

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JASON!

Social Distancing From The Kelvinator

I should begin by explaining the term “Kelvinator”, a term I know only because of my maternal grandmother, Launa Phillips Jones Allen. My grandmother called every refrigerator she owned a “Kelvinator”. The company that manufactured the Kelvinator began life in 1914 (when my grandmother was just a teenie-bopper) as the Electro-Automatic Refrigerating Company, but two years later became the Kelvinator Company. The name was a tribute to the Scottish physicist William Thomson (a.k.a., Lord Kelvin), who accurately determined the value of absolute zero, a temperature we cannot reach, and below which no temperature can exist. (For your information, that is -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit.) My guess is that her first refrigerator was a Kelvinator, which set the stage for the rest of her life.

I spent most of my life about 40 pounds underweight. According to the old height and weight charts from the 1960s, the days before “body mass index”, I should have weighed about 185 pounds when I graduated from high school. I weighed 147. My weight stayed pretty close to that figure until August of 2007, when I quit smoking. Almost overnight I found myself 10 to 20 pounds overweight, a swing of 50 to 60 pounds. Suddenly I couldn’t fit in my clothes (most of which were bought in the 70s and 80s – God, I miss those collars and lapels!).

I was able to drop my weight back to the 185 pound region fairly simply: I stopped buying Cheez Its, Starburst Fruit Chews and Skittles, and started buying Braeburn apples. Still, this required a new wardrobe, as 185 was considerably heavier than 147. I bought new clothes, and began to enjoy being a normal weight.

That changed sometime after May 21, 2013, the date I married Kathy. Later that year we found her bathroom scales in a mover’s box, and on October the 19th of that year, I began my routine of weighing first thing in the morning, and entering the data into a spreadsheet. Periodically I printed out a graph of my weight versus time. This is the figure at the top of this blog, which covers the dates of October 19, 2013 through May 21, 2020.

The first thing to notice is that, although there are fluctuations, the trend is upward. There are a couple of dips along the way, but in general, like a graph of the stock market versus time, the graph tends to go up, up, and up. The second thing to notice is that, very recently, there are no fluctuations. My weight is up, and it appears to be staying there.

Clearly I am not successful at social distancing from the Kelvinator.

Kathy tells me we are going on a diet, if she can just remember the name of the diet. We had lunch with a college roommate last November, and he was telling us about a wonderful diet that he and his wife used with great success. Perry, if you see this, send me a message and tell me yet again the name of that diet, so I can placate Kathy. I prefer the Braeburn apple diet, but Kathy isn’t buying it.

There is one positive thing to report. The bathroom scale that I have been using since October of 2013 finally died. Kathy bought it about 20 years ago, and apparently the batteries in it need changing. I cannot see any easy way to get into the thing to change the batteries, so I made the executive decision that it should go into the trash. With no scale to measure my weight, and no spreadsheet on the bathroom mirror to confront me with my failings, I will now lead a happier, if somewhat heavier, life.

Bon appetit!

Frankly, My Dear . . .

My obsession – and make no mistake, it is an obsession – had humble origins. It began with music.

I bought an iPod in 2006, and quickly became enamored of the ease with which I could carry around my music library. Of course, I immediately transferred all my CDs to my iTunes account, and subsequently to my iPod. That was the easy part. The hard part was digitizing every album, eight track tape, and cassette tape in my library. This task was made more difficult when my friend Charley gave me his jazz record collection, which included some fairly rare 78s. The process of digitizing all this music took a couple of years, and it isn’t finished yet. (I have run across some old albums and 78s that Charley gave me that were somehow misplaced for a few years.) Yes, I even bought a few hundred tunes from the iTunes store (the invention of which should be celebrated as a major historical event, even if the Apple folks are beginning to aggravate me with all the changes they keep foisting on me). But most of the 17,872 songs in my iTunes library are from my record collection, or from Charley’s record collection.

By the way, let me put in a good word for Carbonite. As I noted above, Apple keeps changing iTunes. I hate to download any new version. I believe they honestly think they are making it better. They aren’t. Recently I hit a button in iTunes that should have backed my record collection up to the cloud. It backed up all the music I had purchased from the iTunes store. Unfortunately, it DELETED all the music I hadn’t purchased from the iTunes store. After watching years of work just disappear, I was fit to be tied. Then Kathy reminded me that I subscribe to the Carbonite file back-up system, which operates quietly in the background, backing up files to a cloud somewhere. Within seconds, the 17,000 plus songs had been restored.

Then came video.

I moved to Madison, GA in 2005. After hooking up my television, I discovered that the only channel I could receive was a Spanish language UHF channel from Athens, some 25 miles away. The picture was snowy, and as I don’t speak Spanish, it was useless to me. So I contacted the local cable company, and signed up for the basic service at $60 per month. (You know THAT had to be a long, long time ago!) After a couple of months, it dawned on me that I had only watched one half-hour show. At that rate, I would watch an hour of television every four months, for a price of $240 per hour. I called the cable company and canceled my subscription.

Thus I entered into a very happy time: no television in the house. I spent my evening hours reading, watching movies, and listening to the radio. I discovered an absolutely outstanding radio program, The John Batchelor Show, out of WABC in New York. (If you don’t have an internet radio, you can either stream the show or download the podcast.) Twice a week he focused on book reviews, conversations with the authors that might last as long as two hours. I found myself jumping back and forth between the radio show and my computer, ordering books from Amazon as I listened to the reviews.

All this changed when my son introduced me to WDTV, a little box manufactured by Western Digital, that, one one side, hooked up to a television set, and on the other side, hooked up to a hard drive or flash drive. The Western Digital box allowed me to play video files (that formerly could only be played on a computer) on my television.

Thus began the obsession.

My son loaned me a hard drive that contained maybe 50 or so movies and television shows in either avi, mp4, or mkv format. (Although WDTV plays a wide variety of files, these are the three most popular.) I remember that the drive included the Addams Family television show from the 1960s, as well as the complete Get Smart and Hogan’s Heroes, also from the 60s. Hard drives, and the little WDTV box, take up such a small space in the entertainment center! I soon got rid of my DVD player, ripped all my DVDs to (mostly) mkv files, and settled down to enjoy a little television.

And so it began. I copied the videos from friends’ hard drives. My video collection grew. Every boxed set of DVDs I purchased, along with every bargain movie purchased from the reduced price bin at Wal Mart, and
every gift of a DVD, was added to the hard drive. And somehow, over the course of the years, I ended up with quite a video library. It stands, at the time of this writing, at 9,461 video files (either movies, documentaries, or television shows). They reside on an eight terabyte hard drive.

I have copied the video files I have not yet seen to a two terabyte hard drive. At the time of this writing, there are 3,046 of these files. (This doesn’t include the cartoons and children’s movies that I have for the grandchildren.) I have my work cut out for me.

If I use 365.25 days per year (which takes into account leap years), and if I watch one of these not-yet-viewed videos every day, it will take a bit over eight and one-third years for me to go through my current inventory of videos. This takes me through August of 2028. I should be caught up a bit before my 76th birthday.

Does this seem a silly obsession to you? If so, I have to tell you: frankly, my dear . . .

When in the Course of Human Events

Today, April 27, is a happy day. Farmview Market opened its restaurant today for customers to dine in, and Kathy and I had our first meal out since March 16. Coincidentally, we were the first diners they served.

The thing that I missed most during the quarantine was dining out. I did not realize just how accustomed we had become to visiting restaurants and enjoying a nice, relaxing meal. A typical week would see us eating out two or three times. It has been a long 41 days.

Yes, some of our restaurants served takeout meals, and we enjoyed several of those, but it just wasn’t the same as sitting down at a table, being served by friends, and facing absolutely no cleanup.

We live in Georgia, and our governor has received his share of criticism for reopening the state to business. I believe he is criticized unjustly. Let us recall just why we decided to shut down commerce in the country. The reason given for this drastic action was to prevent the health care delivery system from being overwhelmed.

We have achieved that objective.

Remember the early days of the pandemic. The usual talking heads predicted overflowing hospitals, triage at the hospital door, life and death decisions based on the presumed likelihood of a patient living a long and useful life afterwards, and all sorts of bio-ethical conundrums related to lack of ventilators, hospital beds, etc.

New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic, at least in this country, has bid farewell to the hospital ship the president dispatched to the city. It has released ventilators for distribution to other states. Some hospital wings are nearly empty, as elective surgeries have been postponed. The mission has been accomplished.

My fear, in fact, is that because of the quarantine, we will be hit hard in the fall with a second bout with the Wuhan Flu. We can avoid a devastating second bout, if we have herd immunity. Unfortunately, the quarantine prevents the development of herd immunity.

Herd immunity happens when a fairly substantial part of the population (I’ve heard 60%, but haven’t confirmed that number) develops antibodies to the infection. If enough people have antibodies, the further spread of the infection is inhibited. So, ideally, those with low risk of developing a serious (i.e., fatal) infection get exposed to the virus, recover, and develop antibodies that help prevent the second wave of infections. Those of us at high risk remain sheltered.

This is the approach that Sweden has taken. We should watch the outcome in Sweden, and see what we can learn from it.

By all accounts, the virus is extremely contagious. But the further we go into this wave of infections, the more apparent it is that the fatality rate estimates at the beginning of the quarantine were vastly overstated. For example, an antibody analysis at the University of Miami suggests that the rate of infection in the state is 16 times greater than the initial estimates. So, in calculating the fatality rate, the bigger the denominator, the lower the rate. As best I can tell, this infection has a fatality rate similar to that of the good old fashioned garden variety influenza. That, of course, is bad enough, but we don’t shut down the economy every fall when flu season comes around.

So congratulations to Governor Kemp, and to the governors of Tennessee, South Carolina, and the other states who have decided to re-open cautiously. And congratulations to Farmview Market: breakfast was simply outstanding!