Whatever Happened To . . .

When I began this blog, it was my intention to post something every week, but that rarely happens. Life tends to get in the way. I still have a full time job, and that cuts into my free time. My outside interests also cut into my free time. I love to read, but my reading speed is not very fast, so keeping up with my reading tends to take more time than it should. And then, there are the odd things that strike my fancy. Recently, one odd thing was an article published in August, 2021, in the American Journal of Physics that addressed the force necessary to operate the plunger on a French press. (Feel free to read the paper yourself: The force required to operate the plunger on a French press: American Journal of Physics: Vol 89, No 8 (scitation.org). I looked, but as best I can tell, none of my tax dollars were used by any of the 11 authors in the four or five countries they inhabit to come up with this very simple equation.)

Because of these distractions, I find it necessary to write notes to myself about what may (or, more likely, may not) be good topics for this blog. Some time ago, I wrote a note about two lovely and talented singers who appeared on episode 2, season 17 of The Benny Hill Show (March 31, 1986). These twin sisters, Alison and Rebecca Marsh, were featured as cabaret performers singing "Money Makes The World Go Around", but also showed up in other skits, and were in the opening scene as dancers. I was astounded that I had never seen this pair in any other television show, and after doing a little research, I filed my notes away somewhere near a stack of unread books on the coffee table in my office.

That must have been a couple of years ago. In the meantime, the stack of unread books on the coffee table was replaced with a new stack of unread books, which was eventually moved to make room for something else. So today, when I decided that the time was right to do that column about the Marsh sisters, I could not find my notes.

My notes could not have been very substantial, because there is very little available on the world wide web about these two. Aside from this 1986 appearance on The Benny Hill Show, I found one 1993 appearance on a British television show called Red Dwarf (November 4, 1993), in which they played, ahem, concubines. There is also a video of their performance on Spanish television (year unknown) in which they are introduced in Spanish but perform in English. I was able to find video of yet another television performance, but the show and the date are not documented.

Although we do not know their birthday, we do know that they are two of the six children of Reginald Marsh, a well-known British television actor. Marsh was married twice; Alison and Rebecca were issues from his second marriage (1960 - 2001), to Rosemary Murray.

Given the mores of the 1960s, I suspect that the twins were born in 1960 or later. That would have made them at most 23 years of age when the show was taped, and probably younger. I am terrible at guessing ages from appearances, but this does appear to me to be a reasonable guess.

Their appearance on The Benny Hill Show impressed me greatly; the two videos I saw on the web were somewhat less impressive. They may have disappeared from view because they were simply not that good at their craft. Such a pity.

The DVDs of The Benny Hill Show that I purchased covered his Thames Television/ITV years (1969 - 1989). There may be others covering his entire television career (which began in 1955), but given that I have not yet finished all 19 seasons included on the discs, it will be awhile before I search for them. Each show is about one hour in length. Those of you who remember the American broadcasts of The Benny Hill Show (which I first saw in either the very late 1970s or the early 1980s) will recall that those shows fit into a half-hour slot. The American shows were cut-down versions of the British shows: most of the musical segments were removed, as well as the very raciest of his suggestive, yet funny, skits. Benny Hill did love sexual innuendo.

There are other "whatever happened to" questions from The Benny Hill Show. The Ladybirds provided backup vocals, but were also featured periodically in their own segment of the show. After a few years, they disappeared from the screen, although they were still credited with providing background vocals. Why? Hill's best sidekick, Henry McGee, like Hill himself, is long gone, but I am curious as to what has happened to some of the lovely young lasses who were known collectively as "Hill's Angels". Where are my two favorites, Louise English and Sue Upton? And whatever happened to Hill's Little Angel, Jade Westbrook, who showed up in the later years of the broadcast when she was still a small child?

I guess I should do a little more research. But first, I think I will take a listen to Boots Randolph's "Yakety Sax".

Words That Warm The Cockles Of My Heart

Three events occurred that set me to thinking about words and their usage. The first event: Kathy found a bit of paper in her mother's possessions that must have been written in the late 1960s. It was a single legal-sized sheet put out by the Lovett School entitled "Home Study" that dealt with homework and studying at home. The second was an article in the August 27, 2021 print edition of the Wall Street Journal by Allan Ripp, a New York PR man, entitled "Old-Fangled Words Are Wondrous, Methinks". The third was an encounter with the book by W. J. Cash entitled The Mind of the South (Alfred A. Knopf, 1941).

"Home Study" was a guide to success disguised as a missive on homework. It was typed, and most likely reproduced by photocopy machine. It posited a theory of how learning actually occurs, and then went into specific recommendations. I was drawn to three items on the sheet. The first was the handwritten comments her father made on this document. "Review with Kathy", "Children should do lessons themselves", "No radio, no TV, except weekends", "No telephoning for assignments", "Children must learn to follow directions", "Must do homework even when there's nothing to write - don't just read, but study". He had written two words on top of the sheet, one above the other: "competence" on top, "confidence" on the bottom, with little arrows from one to another, demonstrating how competence in one's studies tended to produce confidence in one's abilities, thus improving competence. As far as I am concerned, everything he wrote is still true today.

The second item that drew my attention was a line at the bottom of the page, with the number "2" inserted by hand. The whole paragraph read as follows:

"Lovett School expects you to do 2 hours of home work a night. If you are not getting that much homework, tell your teacher."

Naturally, I photocopied this piece of paper and distributed it to all my students, who had a good laugh at the suggestion that a student would tell a teacher that the student is not getting enough homework.

The third item that caught my attention was the paragraph dealing with the importance of establishing good study habits. The last sentence in the paragraph is reproduced here: "And don't raid the icebox or use the telephone until you have mastered your assignments."

Don't raid the icebox. I haven't heard the Kelvinator referred to as an icebox in awhile.

Mr. Ripp's article in the Wall Street Journal was a trip down memory lane. We appear to be about the same age, and if not that, at least of the same generation. His wife responded to his comment about a trip to the "beauty parlor" with the quip: "What are you, 95?" I guess the term "beauty parlor" is now passé. I found myself in agreement with him on the use of the words "cool" and "awesome". I would go so far as to outlaw the overused word "awesome" and substitute in its stead "groovy", a grossly under-used word these days. And who can disagree with his final paragraph?

"Speaking decently is no guarantee of being decent - there are upstanding trash-talkers just as there are scoundrels with silver tongues. But I've found it helps to deploy a kind word, a civil word and sometimes an old word to feel right with the world where the past is ever-present."

Which brings me to Wilbur Cash. The copy of his work that I am reading was given to me by my late mother-in-law. She had once lived in Shelby, NC, and Cash had once been the editor of the local Shelby newspaper. Apparently he was the biggest thing to hit that small town, and newcomers to the community were almost forced to read him. Cash was a fellow Demon Deacon, having graduated from Wake Forest College in 1922. The book was published in February of 1941, and offers what can charitably be described as a controversial view of the South. According to the back cover of the paperback, Time considered it a masterpiece: "Anything written about the South henceforth must start where he leaves off." The Nashville Agrarians, however, did not think so highly of the book. They were not alone. The historian C. Vann Woodward offered several penetrating criticisms of his work, the most damning of which (it seems to me) is that Cash simply ignored any evidence that was contrary to the point he was making.

But this is not a book review. A book written by a 1922 college graduate is sure to contain some phrases no longer current, and Cash does not disappoint on that score. The recurring phrase that caught my attention at first was the "proto-Dorian bond" (and later, the "proto-Dorian rank") which, I think, is a reference to the Doric Knights of Sparta. "Proto-Dorian" appears over and over in the work, but is never defined. And that is not the only Greek reference in the work. I had never, to my knowledge, heard of an "Eidolon". Words such as "douzepers" and "larruped" sent me to the dictionary.

Of course, there are references in the book to "modern" writers (Thomas Nelson Page) and less modern writers (William Gilmore Simms), as well as some of the classic writers (Sallust, Cicero). I had to look up references to the "days of Thorough" and "the quest for the Sangraal".

I thought that Cash had made up one word, but it turns out that "gyneolatry" is an actual word with a real definition. And, as it happens, I am guilty of it.

One final word (pardon the pun): another article appeared in the Wall Street Journal recently entitled "Joe Biden's Presidency Is Incredible - No, Really". A few sentences in the article alleviated my confusion:

"I don't mean 'incredible' in the sense the word has come to be used in the modern argot of our rapidly devaluing language. . . I should make clear that what makes Joe Biden an incredible president is that you can't believe a word he says."

Groovy n'est-ce pas?

Cauliflower Rice Is The New Purple Cabbage

One of the joys of my time of life is the simplicity of mealtime. No longer do the kiddies gather around the table. Nowadays it is just the two of us, and meals are easy.

Recently I have been going through our monthly expenditures, classifying the money we spend: food, entertainment, utilities, you know the routine. I was shocked, and somewhat embarrassed, to note the enormous sum we spend on food each month. Most of that, I am afraid, is due to the fact that we eat out a good bit. After all, when it is just the two of us, it takes very little persuasion to convince us that eating out is the sensible alternative. (If Kathy cooks, I do dishes, and vice versa, so every meal at home is work for both of us.) As for grocery shopping, Kathy tends to buy the non-gmo, all organic, farm-to-table foods: in other words, the expensive stuff. As best I can tell, the major advantage to buying organic foods is that you get to pay more for it.

But another serious contributor to our food bill is the food delivery service. Currently we are with Green Chef, our fourth meal delivery service. As with the other three services, Green Chef provides us with three meals each week. The foods are, of course, non-gmo, organic, farm-to-table. Each of the food delivery services genuflects to the trendy gods.

Our first service, and in many ways our best, was Blue Apron. I learned a good bit about cooking from the excellent recipes and hints that accompanied those meals. Blue Apron provided absolutely everything you needed to cook each meal, except for three items: salt, pepper, and olive oil. If the recipe called for a pinch of Latvian ossenfay and 1.34 grams of Bulgarian shafafa, you simply had to look in the box to find a sealed plastic bag containing a pinch of Latvian ossenfay and 1.34 grams of Bulgarian shafafa.

The Blue Apron meals were delicious, even the ones that had chicken as the meat. (I have eaten so much yard bird in my lifetime that I now avoid it whenever possible.) But there were downsides to Blue Apron. The recipes involved a good bit of preparation. There were no shortcuts. It would take 45 minutes to do two hamburgers and fries. You would wash the potatoes peel the potatoes, slice the potatoes, season the potatoes, and bake the potatoes, followed by chopping the onion, chopping the garlic, slicing the tomato, adding in the seasoning blend, forming the patties, and grilling the burgers. Of course one cannot forget the buttering and toasting of the buns. Yes, the burgers and fries were delicious, but hardly worth 45 minutes in the kitchen. And the meals were selected with taste, not calories, in mind. A delicious Blue Apron meal could screw up your calorie count for the day.

Toward the end of our association with Blue Apron, the calorie problem was partially resolved as Blue Apron began shrinking the sizes of their portions. That was just fine with Kathy, but it left me a tad hungry, after burning all those calories with the chopping and slicing.

Hello Fresh was our second service. Food preparation time with Hello Fresh was less than with Blue Apron, as the recipes were simpler. What killed Hello Fresh for me was yard bird. Initially, we were receiving one fish, one beef, and one chicken meal each week. Kathy tried to get them to substitute pork for the chicken, but invariably we would still receive chicken each week. After the third or fourth conversation with them about the chicken, we decided to move on.

The third service was nice, and each meal was very convenient, but the variety just was not there. After a few weeks we found ourselves repeating meals, something that had never happened with the first two services in the years we were with them. I will not name the service because they did provide good food, and I do not want to bad-mouth them.

Our current service, Green Chef, seems to be perfect: simpler recipes than with Blue Apron, sufficient portions for a large man like me, fewer calories, and a good variety. Unfortunately, yard bird still shows up from time to time, but I am learning to live with it. There is one thing I have noticed, and I noticed this with both Blue Apron and Hello Fresh: they tend to get into ruts with some of the vegetables. By the time we left Blue Apron, we were having purple cabbage with every meal. The fad of the moment with Green Chef is cauliflower rice, which is not even rice.

Rice contains starch, which is a good thing if you are not on a low carbohydrate diet. Cauliflower does not contain starch, which is a bad thing if you are not on a low carbohydrate diet. Granted that one hour after eating rice I start to get hungry again, but with cauliflower rice, that interval reduces to about twenty minutes. That is just not a good thing, to be hungry so soon after a meal.

The country seems to be fixated these days on the vaccine for the Wuhan Flu. Have you had your shots? It seems to me that the government is wasting a fantastic opportunity to increase the vaccination rate. All they have to do is find the salesman who convinced Green Chef to include cauliflower rice with every bloody meal. Find this guy, put him in charge of marketing flu shots to America, and soon we will have a 100% vaccination rate.

And then, with Green Chef no longer under the influence of this mad marketing genius, I will be able to get some real rice with a meal!

The Difficulty In Saying “Goodbye”

My father died twenty years ago. Two years after his death, my mother remarried, sold the family homestead, and moved in with her new husband. When she sold the house, she managed to sell or give away most of its contents. She sold most of his woodworking equipment. One of my daughters wanted the North Carolina twenty cent postage stamp mug. Another needed a bed. I ended up with a Philco radio/record player that my father gave my mother in 1949 on the occasion of their first wedding anniversary, electronic test equipment, and books. Tons of books.

When her second husband died, my mother moved in with my sister, Debbie. The possessions that my mother still owned were put in a storage unit for a brief period of time, and Debbie rapidly either moved them into her house, or got rid of them. So when my mother died three years ago, there was no need for an estate sale.

Kathy’s father died fourteen years ago, but her mother never remarried. When her mother died, six years ago, we were faced with the prospect of cleaning out the house in which her mother had lived for more than forty years. Given that Kathy was an only child, we had no other family members to whom we could distribute her possessions. We ended up renting a storage unit. Over the course of the years we moved various pieces of furniture from the storage unit to other houses, gave items to Kathy’s children, and donated items to Goodwill, Joseph’s Coat, and other organizations. Kathy's mother was a painter, and we inherited several hundred of her paintings. We've hung them, sold them, given them to friends, and donated them, but we still have many in storage.

This month Kathy finally decided that six years with a storage unit was too long, and we cleaned it out. Our garage is now the storage unit, as you can see from the picture above. We would like, one day, to have a functioning garage again, so we will now have to go through the process of keeping, donating, or tossing most of the items in the garage. This, of course, is the difficult part. And while Kathy will have to make many difficult decisions in the near future, her situation has forced me to reconsider my possessions, and the grip they have on me.

I've spent a lifetime building a library that is my pride and joy, and yet, knowing that I will not live forever, I have asked my children to take any of my books they want. I have received very few takers. My children are wise. Most of my father's books are electronics books, and while I have used several of them in my various jobs in the past, there are many that just sit there, never consulted, never to be consulted. Apart from those that may actually be collectors’ items (e.g., Modern Radio Servicing, by Alfred A. Ghirardi, B.S., E.E., copyright 1935), I should get rid of them.

But getting rid of them means saying “goodbye”.

I keep these items because they are a direct connection between me and my father. As long as they are here, I feel that he is here, at least in some manner, and I don't have to say a final “goodbye”. It is silly, I know. My father exists in my memory, not in any of the items he once possessed. Every time I hear myself saying “if the job is worth doing, it is worth doing right”, I have a flashback to my father. The same goes with “if you want the job done right, do it yourself”. And every time the 1937 Tommy Dorsey hit “Marie” shows up on Sirius XM channel 73, I hear my father’s improvised lyrics. “Marie, the dawn is breaking/Marie, you’ll soon be waking” in Dad’s rendition became “Marie, the dawn is breaking/Marie, my belly’s aching”. I will carry my father with me, with or without the books, with or without the electronic test equipment that will never again be used, with or without that classic Philco radio/record player/piece of furniture.

I know all this, in my head. I don't yet know it in my heart.

In order to make room for some of the items Kathy now has in the garage, some of my “stuff” will have to go. Both of us will be making hard decisions in the near future. I believe the hardest decision will be do I burden my children with the desiderata of my life? Should I force them into the position I now find myself?

Sometimes I think “let us have a proper housecleaning, let us get rid of all those items with no value, no use”. At other times I think “I am tired, and I should let my children sort this out”.

I do not know how, eventually, this will be resolved. That will be determined by the circumstances at the time I finally decide to say “goodbye”.

The Little White House

April the 16th! That was my last blog post. I really intended to be more diligent during my summer break, but, as you can see, that did not happen. I had hoped to schedule the post below for the 23rd of April, as we made the trip that is the topic of this post on April the 10th. I don't recall why I didn't make that deadline. But here we are, three months later.

He was not my favorite president: that honor is reserved for either Calvin Coolidge or Ronald Reagan, depending upon my mood. (Given the unprecedented spending binge going on in Washington, DC, Silent Cal currently has the edge.) He was, however, a transformative president. For my parents’ generation, he was THE president. Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to power in 1933, during the third year of the Great Depression, and died, in office, in the twelfth year of his presidency. Though several tried, he was the only president to break George Washington’s precedent of only two full terms as president. Thanks to the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, ratified less than six years after his death, he will remain forever the only president to have done so.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born into a wealthy family. His father, James Roosevelt I, was married to his second cousin, Rebecca Brien Howland. That union produced a son, James Roosevelt. Unfortunately, Rebecca had heart trouble, and died from a heart attack in the 23rd year of the marriage. Four years later he met and married his sixth cousin, Sara Ann Delano. Two years later, Franklin was born, during his father's 54th year. I find it interesting that Franklin continued this tradition of marriage within the family by marrying his fifth cousin once removed, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Franklin was educated by private tutors, and at Groton and Harvard. He entered Columbia Law School, but dropped out after he passed the New York bar exam. After practicing law briefly, he entered the world of politics, following in the footsteps of his fifth cousin, President Theodore Roosevelt. He was in the New York State Senate for two years, then joined the Woodrow Wilson administration as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, for seven years. Roosevelt's plan for his next political office showed extreme ambition: he had his sights set on becoming the Vice President of the United States.

Roosevelt left his position as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in August of 1920, a presidential election year. He had tried to talk Herbert Hoover into running for the presidency, with Roosevelt as his running mate, but Hoover revealed that he was a Republican, and was not inclined to run for the presidency that year. James Cox of Ohio was eventually nominated by the Democratic convention, with Roosevelt as his running mate. This ticket lost to the Warren Harding/Calvin Coolidge Republican ticket.

All that is prologue. The story of Franklin Roosevelt that is most familiar to the public began the following year, 1921, when he was stricken with polio. He was left permanently paralyzed from the waist down, but he had no intention of letting that interfere with his political career. He learned to maneuver for short distances with leg braces, usually supported to one side by an aide. Although his paralysis was not a secret, he was never photographed in a wheelchair. This is where the town of Warms Springs, Georgia, enters the story.

Believing the warm springs in the area to be beneficial, he established a polio rehabilitation center in Warm Springs in 1926. The springs did not cure his disease, but he believed that the springs helped with his symptoms. He eventually built the house that is now called the Little White House in Warm Springs in 1932, while he was still governor of the state of New York. He was inaugurated as President of the United States the following year. It was in this house, on April 12, 1945, at the age of 63, that Roosevelt suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died.

Although the house is a National Historic Landmark, the Little White House is a part of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, State Parks and Historic Sites. In order to get to the house itself, one first passes through the museum. I am not normally fond of that diversionary tactic, but the museum was well done and absolutely worth the visit. The house itself is quite modest, by today's standards, but laid out in a way that I find appealing. I could see retiring in such a house. Of course, the modest size of the house is achievable because of the two adjacent houses: one for visitors, one for servants. In order to exit the grounds, one is forced to go through the gift shop, but the gift shop, like the museum, was well done.

The town of Warm Springs is absolutely charming. We had an excellent lunch at Lightnin' Bugs Bakery and Cafe. I can see visiting this town again.

Fifty Years Too Late

Fifty years! A couple of weeks ago it hit me: sometime during the first or second week of June this year my classmates and I will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of our high school graduation. I sent a message to a friend, asking about a reunion. Postponed, she replied. Apparently we are still feeling the effects of the Wuhan Flu.

Our graduating class contained, if memory serves, 128 graduates. There are several that are no longer with us, and I am still shocked when I hear that one has passed, even though we are all senior citizens. I still find it impossible to believe that a classmate, Betty, is no longer with us. And even though I have not met many of the spouses of my classmates, I still am saddened when one passes, as did Jonnie's husband recently.

I recall the summer of 1971 fondly. That fall I would begin my academic career at Wake Forest University, with most of my expenses covered by an academic scholarship. As was the custom of the time, I had a summer job, working in the shipping department of a spinning mill. Ginned cotton came in one end of the mill, and yarn exited the other end. I worked weird hours: 9 AM until 1 PM, then 6 PM until 10 PM. They called it a split shift. I didn't like it, of course, but it was job, and I had plans for the money I earned.

The aggravating part of the job was my boss. He and I were in the first grade together. Rumor has it he was in the first grade the year before I got there, and I'm pretty sure he was in the first grade the year after I moved to the second grade. I can't remember his name, nor can I remember the name of his good-looking older sister. That summer convinced me that I should look for work that involved my head, and not my back.

Tobacco was still the primary cash crop in the state of North Carolina, and the tobacco harvest usually ended around Labor Day, so the schools did not crank up until after that last summer holiday. Because I was a freshman, I had to report for a week of orientation, so I had to be on campus the week before Labor Day. My mother and I drove to school that last week of August in a 1970 Ford Falcon. I unloaded the car, we said goodbye, and I was, for the first time in my life, on my own.

Earlier that summer I received a letter telling me that my summer reading was to be the 1940 novel The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene. Incoming freshmen were assigned an adviser, and we were told that we would discuss the novel in our advising groups. I bought the paperback version, and had every good intention of reading it. But somehow the summer passed quickly, and I found myself on campus with the paperback unread in my luggage.

My adviser was in the Speech, Communications, and Theater Arts Department (otherwise known as the Jock Department, for the number of scholarship athletes who chose this as a major), and apparently he was no fan of Graham Greene, because, as best I can recall, we never discussed the unread novel. And so it passed that I shirked my first assignment at my new college, and never paid a price.

That paperback remained, unread, on my bookshelf until just a few years ago, when I gave it to one of my children. I have been trying for many years now to downsize, so when my kids come to visit, I force books on them. This may be why they don't visit often. But it has worked. I started with 16 bookcases in our little house here, and we are now down to 15 1/2. A few more years of steady progress, and we will be down to 15.

Shortly after noting the upcoming fiftieth anniversary, my conscience began to bother me. I really should have read that book. Now the copy I bought back in 1971 was gone. Fortunately, a part of my downsizing scheme has been replacing physical books with electronic books, so a few minutes on the Barnes and Noble app resulted in my being the proud owner of a copy of The Power and the Glory, purchased nearly fifty years after that first purchase.

And I have just finished reading the book. It really is quite nice, and I wish I had read when it was assigned. I will not go into the details, because writing book reports brings back bad memories. But I do recommend it, if you are so inclined.

I feel better now. And I just remembered the name of that good-looking older sister of my 1971 summer boss! They say the mind is the second thing to go, so I am happy that my mind is relatively intact. If only I could remember what is the first thing to go . . .

Hear No Evil

My hearing has never been good. The first big hint that my hearing was not quite up to par occurred in first grade. My teacher, a Mrs. Bell, or possibly a Miss Bell, in her wisdom had me seated at the very back of a long row of desks, across from my friend Andy Cobb. One day, clearly exasperated with the behavior of the class, she announced that the very next person who spoke would get a paddling. I did not understand her, so I leaned across the aisle and whispered “Andy, what did she say?” “GEORGE BATTEN!” came the roar from the beast that was Mrs. or Miss Bell. I spent the next several minutes unsuccessfully arguing that I should not be paddled because of my hearing. Subsequently I was whacked several times on the palm of my hand with a wooden ruler. From that moment on I had no respect for that woman. She did teach me one valuable life lesson: life is not fair.

I am quite sure that my hearing loss took a serious turn for the worse during the late 1960s and early 1970s. I had a massive, allegedly portable, vacuum-tube-filled stereo system that my father “fixed up” for me. (I have that system to this day, though I haven’t used it in many years.) In his wisdom, he added a headphone jack to the machine, which I used with a huge pair of over-the-ear headphones. I was absolutely mesmerized with the quality of the sound, and was able to hear things I could not hear through the speakers. And, of course, if I could hear the music clearly for the first time with headphones, I should be able to hear even more clearly at high volume. I remember playing Isaac Hayes’ “Theme from Shaft” over and over and over again, at a volume so high that I am surprised my ears did not bleed. This would have been around my senior year in high school or my freshman year in college. I still have that 45 RPM, though the grooves are severely worn. My hearing grew worse.

After finally finishing with school, I took a job in the paper industry. For the next 22 years I worked in high noise environments, and it is at this time that I became serious about protecting my hearing. The hearing test was an annual obligation, and the frightening decline in my hearing was there on paper to see, year after year. I used hearing protection at work, of course, but I even began using it at home, while mowing the lawn. The decline was inexorable.

After leaving the paper industry, I dispensed with the annual hearing test, because I assumed that my hearing loss should level off after I quit subjecting myself to high noise environments. I continued to use hearing protection around the house, and at the gun range. But something happened recently that tells me the hearing loss never took a vacation.

For the past nine months or so I have been suffering from tinnitus. At first it was simply annoying, but eventually it bothered me so much that I made an appointment to have my GP check it out. I was hoping for a simple cause: impacted ear wax. Unfortunately, my ear canals were clean as a whistle. So it came to pass that I made an appointment with the Ear, Nose, and Throat man.

He proceeded to inform me that tinnitus is a frontal lobe problem. According to the National Institutes of Health website, researchers “propose that the limbic system—a linked network of brain structures involved in emotion, behavior, and long-term memory—acts as a gatekeeper to keep the tinnitus signal from reaching the auditory cortex, the part of the brain that mediates our conscious perception of sounds. In people with tinnitus, they suggest, the gate has broken.”

After hearing that this is a frontal lobe problem, Kathy suggested a pre-frontal lobotomy. The doctor, fortunately, ignored her, and opted instead for an MRI of my brain. To Kathy's surprise, they found that I have one. The radiologist has by now reviewed the scan and I suspect my ENT has his report. I will hear the details in a couple of weeks.

By the way, if the technician offers you a copy of your brain scan, don’t take it. I popped the disc of MRI images into my computer, and immediately was beset with worry. Are those amyloid plaques? Does that blood vessel look right, or is it about to blow? Just don’t do it.

This week I had my first hearing test in 21 years. The results were absolutely shocking. A young human with good hearing should be able to hear up to 20,000 Hertz (Hz). That sensitivity to high frequencies does not last for too many years, as the nerves in the ear begin to die off. The higher frequencies are the first to go. Twenty-one years ago I could hear up to a frequency of about 11,000 Hz. This week I learned that my hearing cut-off was somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 Hz.

Things could be worse. The highest note on the piano is just a tad bit over 4,000 Hz, and I can hear that, so for the most part I can still enjoy music. The human voice is pitched much lower, so I can hear most conversations, though I really do need you to add a few decibels when speaking. But the path forward, tinnitus or no tinnitus, is clear: my hearing is in what appears to be an unstoppable decline.

As Kathy pointed out, there is a bright side to all this. To paraphrase a quote from the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “A little hearing loss is good for a marriage.”

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.