Local Hero

Salena Zito is a national treasure. She writes for the Washington Examiner, the New York Post, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and her columns are generally uplifting and inspiring. What else would you expect from a column that she calls "Dispatches from The Middle of Somewhere"? ("In my estimation, there is no patch of geography in this country that is the 'middle of nowhere.' This is America; everywhere is the middle of somewhere.") Her recent column in the Washington Examiner is well worth the time spent reading it. It reminded me that I spend too much time worrying about our self-inflicted wounds of inflation, gasoline prices, food shortages, and addiction to opioids, and not enough time dwelling on the good things that happen every day. This column is my attempt to make up for my past posts that, quite frankly, could depress a hyena.

This is a true story about a local hero. Very few people know about his heroism, and with good reason: it occurred nearly 23 years ago. Our hero was, at the time, 11 years old.

The lad was spending some vacation time with his father, on South Beach, Bald Head Island, NC. He struck up a friendship with another lad of approximately the same age, and found himself at the beach with his young friend, and the young friend’s family. His new-found friend had a half-brother, approximately 18 months of age, a mother, and a step-father. The mother and step-father were in the ocean, enjoying the calm seas, the toddler was in a trough or ditch in the sand, about a foot and one-half deep, that ran along the beach, parallel to the shore, and the two 11-years-old boys were sitting on the beach nearby, doing whatever it is that 11-years-old boys do.

A bit further out to sea, a big barge came drifting by. Big barges create big wakes. The folks out in the ocean noticed the wake, but by the time it came ashore, it created some excitement. The wake moved much further up the beach than the normal wave action, far enough to fill the ditch or trough containing the 18-months-old toddler with water.

Mothers are observant creatures. The mother of the toddler may have been floating out on the ocean, but she saw immediately what had happened, and she realized she would not be able to get to shore in time to save the toddler. So she screamed, in a voice recognizable by one and all as the voice of panic: “GET MY BABY!”

Our hero had not noticed that the toddler was in danger, but the voice of the mother made him look around. He saw what was happening, then turned to the toddler’s half-brother, expecting him to spring into action. But the half-brother sat frozen. So our hero, who later said “I just did what I was told”, hopped up and raced over to the trough.

He plunged his arm into the water at the point where he last saw the toddler, but the toddler was not there. The water in the trough was moving, probably towards the sea. Our hero moved a few feet down the trough and tried again, this time feeling the toddler’s arm. He pulled the toddler out of the trough: the poor little fellow was spitting up water. Shortly thereafter, the mother arrived and did what mothers do: she took command of the situation. The toddler survived, with no ill effects, and the mother was extremely grateful.

After the vacation, our hero returned home to his mother in Atlanta, who soon received a phone call from Ojai, California, inviting the young hero out to the toddler’s home. The young hero flew out to visit with the family, and had a grand old time.

In the intervening years, our hero would hear from the family occasionally, but with the passage of time come the transitions of life. Our hero graduated high school, went off to college, did some traveling, and eventually settled down in Asheville, NC. In those pre-social media days, it was difficult to keep up with folks who moved around the country, and our hero lost touch with the family.

Recently, the half-brother found our hero on social media, and contacted him. A few days later, our hero received a very nice letter from the mother of the “toddler” (now in his mid-20s), and, more surprising, a hefty check. The letter, which our hero shared with me, was one of the sweetest, most sincere letters I have ever read. The mother once again thanked our hero for giving her the opportunity to spend the last twenty-something-odd years with her younger son. She thinks of his actions on that day frequently, and offered words describing a gratitude that can never be fully expressed. She invited him to visit the family, now living in Mexico. Our hero wrote back. Their connection has been re-established.

This, my friends, is America. It is the lad who did something heroic, thinking he was only doing what he was told. It is the mother who recognizes that life is fragile, and that, but for the actions of an 11-years-old child, she would have received a wound that would never heal. It is about gratitude, and humility. It is about personal connections. It is about bringing us together, not pushing us apart.

It is the exact opposite of social media.

The Onset of Wisdom

Every generation that follows ours is doing something wrong. It has always been that way. The World War I generation (my grandparents) undoubtedly thought that the World War II generation (my parents) was filled with ne'er-do-wells, while the World War II generation knew that the Baby Boomers (my generation) were lost causes. What is it with all this loud music, long hair, dope smoking and the like? We Baby Boomers are, of course, sure that our high standards are not being met by the generations that followed us. (Forgive me, but since I do not know the differences between Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z, the Millennials, etc., I will just lump them altogether.) But I do see a glimmer of hope in the current generations of younger people. About that, more later.

My favorite philosopher, Clint Eastwood, had a classic line in one of the Dirty Harry movies: "A man's got to know his limitations." There is not an elected politician within a 100 mile radius of Washington, DC, who knows his or her limitations. Acknowledging one's limitations is not how one gets elected. For proof, see the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Government's first response to any problem is "We've got to do something!" In many cases, though, there are very few things the government can do to help a situation, but very many things a government can do to make a situation worse. In the case of this pandemic, the government threw its considerable resources behind developing and bringing to market quickly a shot, orginally thought to be a vaccine, for the Wuhan Flu. That was one of the few things the government could do to make the situation better. Many of you will argue the opposite, and I can certainly see your point.

Most of the rest of the government's response, in my opinion, only made matters worse. Shutting down the economy and forcing people to isolate was a disaster. A recent study from Johns Hopkins University makes that point. Some of the recommendations that we still follow today - masking, social distancing - had little basis in science. But the worst effect of all this was the transfer of power to the Federal government, at the cost of our individual liberties. That happened because the population was dreadfully fearful of the Wuhan Flu. And that was primarily the result of a press corps that slanted the news to hype the fear. Everyone fears death, and the death toll from the virus (we were told) was horrendous.

Within the last couple of weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been a bit more forthcoming regarding the statistics on death from the Wuhan Flu. We discovered that some of the deaths attributed to the virus were deaths in patients caused by something else: the patient tested positive for the virus, so the death was listed as due to the virus. And in a remarkable bit of honesty, the director of the CDC discussed the role of comorbidities, other illnesses that contributed to the fatal nature of the infection.

In an interview on the television show Good Morning America, the director of the CDC discussed Covid deaths between December 2020 and October 2021 for those who had received two jabs. Of those who died, 100% had at least one risk factor or comorbidity. Seventy-eight percent of those who died had at least four comorbidities. If these are the numbers for those who were "fully vaccinated", what are the numbers for the "unvaccinated" who died? One can imagine a similar trend: those who are weakened by other risk factors are more likely to succumb to the virus. This, by the way, is true of influenza in general.

And there are the deaths caused by stupidity. The governor of New York issued an order requiring nursing homes to take patients who had tested positive for the virus. A couple of other states did something similarly stupid, placing those who were contagious in a population with the pre-eminent comorbidity: old age.

If the goverment had been honest about the statistics, and if the press had shed its "If it bleeds, it leads" mentality, there might have been less fear of death from the virus, less power transferred to the government, and a more rational approach to the pandemic.

I have talked with students who, to this day, are frightened to death of catching the Wuhan Flu, even though there is little reason to be afraid of dying from the disease. I have seen students withdraw from their classmates and become less social. I knew one student who committed suicide during the pandemic, though no one can say with certainty that the suicide was a result of the pandemic. The atmosphere of fear is the worst of the pandemic's outcomes for young people.

But there is hope that the current generations of young folks are turning a corner. Recently I witnessed two examples of young people who have had an epiphany. The first has to do with the Wuhan Flu, and the second has to do with government power in general.

I know a young lady who believed the recommendations the various government agencies issued. She had the shots, she wore the mask, she socially distanced, she did everything requested of her. She did not get the Wuhan Flu, but she did suffer some medical consequences that her doctor believes are associated with the Wuhan Flu shots. She now wonders why the government pushed hard for everyone to be jabbed when the long-term consequences of the shots were unknown. And now that we are beginning to see some of the medical consequences of the shots, all the while noting that the shots seem to be ineffective against the omicron variant, she asks why does the government continue this push to get the jabs?

She is beginning to see that our government is not the fount of all wisdom. She sees that this is not a kind and benevolent government, but a government intent on forcing its citizens to do as it wishes.

A student of mine, taking an economics course, had to do a bit of role-playing. His teacher assigned the student a job, earning excellent money, and told the student to take this money and plan his life. Based on data from government websites, the student “bought” a house and a brand new muscle car. He was living the good life, until one of the other students in the course pointed out that the student had not deducted taxes from his imaginary paycheck. After the taxes were deducted, the student went from buying a house to sharing an apartment, and the new muscle car gave way to a second-hand Toyota Corolla. He no longer had the disposable income to travel, or to attend concerts, and the like. He then asked the key question: where does all this tax money go?

These two members of the post-Baby Boom generations are beginning to experience the onset of wisdom.

And It's Another New Year!

Happy New Year to you all! My thoughts on the year that will pass away in a couple of hours are pretty much the same as my thoughts on the year that preceded it: goodbye, and good riddance!

I had high hopes for 2021. The Wuhan flu vaccines were brought to market just after the November elections, and I was pretty sure that would cure all my problems. Enough people would be vaccinated, and the world would return to normal. Boy, was I wrong.

I debated with myself about getting the jab. My health is good, and in all my years I've never taken a flu shot. It has been almost 40 years since I had a case of the flu. My immune system seems to be up to snuff, which is probably one of only two advantages to spending 10 years of my life as a road warrior. (The other is lifetime Medallion status with Delta Air Lines, a consequence of flying one million air miles with them in a span of 10 years.) Plus, at the beginning of the year, vaccines were scarce, and there were older people in poor health who needed the jab more than I did.

In the end, I decided that it was worth a couple of shots for life to return to normal. By the end of March I had received the jabs, and was waiting for a return to normalcy.

We finished the school year under masking and social distancing requirements. Fortunately, graduation last May was a maskless affair, with the promise that the new school year would be normal.

About a week before our pre-school-year work days, I received the email that ruined my year: we would have to wear those ineffective and useless masks. Fortunately, social distancing, while required, was pretty much observed in the breach.

Why do I hate the masks so much, aside from the fact that they are useless? I am partially deaf, and have gotten along for years by lip-reading. I cannot do that with the idiotic masks on my students. Plus, the damned things fog my glasses, and get to be pretty irritating by lunch time as my beard stubble starts to appear. And of course, the most irritating thing of all is that for the last 18 months or so, the only place I have worn the mask is at the school. We follow whatever the CDC says, which I believe is a colossal mistake. But the vast majority of my life these past 18 months or so have been maskless, and yet here I am.

Things got worse. Whereas last school year we were allowed to take the masks off when out of doors, a little in to the school year we were informed that we had to wear the masks out of doors. We follow the CDC. The question is, do they follow the science?

Hoping against hope that the booster would help the world return to normal, I took the third jab. That was a complete waste of time.

The latest variant, Omicron, is spreading like wildfire. It is killing next to no one. Two days ago Bloomberg News had the following headline: "US Covid Deaths Are Falling As Omicron Cases Surge". That really didn't answer my question, which was how many deaths from the Omicron variant have we seen in the U.S. It took awhile to find the answer. It is almost as if no one wants to publish the figure. The figure I have is through Christmas Eve, and that figure is ONE: A Harris County, Texas man who, they helpfully tell us, was unvaccinated.

This is what an intelligent biological scientist would have predicted. Darwin's survival of the fittest is at work here. The Omicron variant spreads rapidly but is not as likely to kill off its host as the other variants. Both these mutations help its survival. And its rapid spread seems to be crowding out the Delta variant.

I have two points to make, then I will leave you to your celebrations. The "vaccines" are not vaccines in the traditional sense of that word. When I received the Salk vaccine, life returned to normal. No more mid-day naps, which were thought to protect against polio, and likewise no restrictions on swimming at a public pool, which also was thought at the time to be a breeding ground for the polio virus. And as far as I know, excluding the disastrous batch of vaccine made by Cutter Labs on the west coast, no one who had the vaccine ever caught polio. (Some 40,000 cases of polio occurred because Cutter Labs failed to inactivate the virus properly.) That cannot be said of the current "vaccine". I heard the Vice President on a video clip the other day, and at first I thought she misspoke. But she repeated this at least twice: everyone she knew who caught the Wuhan flu had been vaccinated. That is less like a vaccine and more like our traditional flu shots. It is a roll of the dice with a flu shot, and some years as many as 60% of those who received the shot still catch the influenza. So, I suggest we stop calling this a vaccine, and call it what it really is: a flu shot.

Point two: the relative ineffectiveness of the vaccine against these recent variants, and the evolution of the virus to a highly transmissible but less deadly strain, means the pandemic is over. It is now endemic, meaning it will be with us forever, like the swine flu, the Spanish flu, the Hong Kong flu, and all the others. Which means that it is time for us to return to normal life and quit hectoring our fellow humans who choose not to get the jab, or to wear a mask, or to wash hands as if suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder. We are going to be living with the Wuhan flu forever more, so get used to it.

I wonder how many years it will take the CDC to reach that obvious conclusion?

The Book of the Year

Back in my single days - before cable television and streaming channels - I entertained myself by reading a book, or listening to the radio, or watching a movie. I would read a book nearly every week. On weekends when I did not have a date, I would listen to the John Batchelor Show out of New York (WABC, 770 AM in those days - he is on WOR, 710 AM these days). His weekend shows featured book reviews, and very often on a dateless Saturday night I would find myself at the computer, ordering the books I heard reviewed that night.

Now, I am lucky to read a book every month. Books compete with the great variety of mysteries one can find on the streaming channels, and most nights, the books lose out to these television mysteries. So I was rather pleased to see that, as of this writing, I managed to read 16 books this year.

Four of the books dealt with world wars. The York Patrol, by James Carl Nelson, was a detailed look at the action that won acting Corporal Alvin York his Medal of Honor. The Secret War, by Max Hastings, examined the intelligence communities of World War II, and how the various enemies (and on occasion, the allies) spied on each other. Operation Vengeance, by Dan Hampton (my most recent read) was a riveting account of the operation that killed Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the Pearl Harbor sneak attack. Since the P-38s used in this operation took off from the island of Guadalcanal, the introductory chapters that detailed the invasion of that island gave me a new perspective on Guadalcanal's importance. But the most enjoyable World War II read was I Marched With Patton, a memoir by Frank Sisson.

I managed to read five novels. A Good Marriage, by Kimberly McCreight, and Every Vow You Break, by Peter Swanson, were okay. I have a tendency to finish a book that I've started, so that is why I stuck with these until the end. I'm sure they are fine, but just not my cup of tea. I've already mentioned in a previous post the Graham Greene novel The Power and the Glory. I enjoyed that novel, as I did 1984, by George Orwell. In light of today's political environment, 1984 seems less like a novel and more like a book on current events. But the best novel I read this year was undoubtedly Find You First, by Linwood Barclay. I will not spoil your enjoyment, should you choose to read the novel, by giving you any further details. I consider the premise behind this novel to be fascinating.

I read Natasha Trethewey's memoir Memorial Drive for two reasons: I once lived near Memorial Drive, and the Wall Street Journal sent it to me free as partial compensation for the exhorbitantly expensive cost of a WSJ subscription. It was just okay. The same can be said for Just Show Up, by Cal Ripken, Jr. I know, as I write this, that I will receive grief for this comment from a friend of mine in Maryland, but that's life. Jocks tend not to write great books, even with the help of ghost writers. And although I admire Cal Jr., he is still a jock, and I am too old to be inspired by a locker room pep talk, especially when it is a book-length locker room pep talk.

That leaves five books. I am going to classify these books as historical works. I mentioned W. J. Cash's book The Mind of the South in an earlier posting, so I will say no more here, other than the fact that I'm glad I finally finished that book. I took an online course from Hillsdale College on the Book of Genesis, by Moses, so I re-read all 50 chapters. This time around I read the New English translation, a 1970 Christmas gift from my parents and my brother. That translation does not contain the beauty of the King James Version, but it is much easier to understand. I managed another biography of John C. Calhoun, by Margaret L. Coit, and her attention to detail in John C. Calhoun: American Portrait, leaves me in awe of historians who write well. N-4 Down, by Mark Piesing, kept me on the edge of my seat. It is the story of the loss of an Italian lighter-than-air craft that was engaged in exploration of the North Pole. And it answered a question that had never before crossed my mind: whatever became of the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen?

I have saved the best for last: Beyond, by Stephen Walker. I grew up knowing every detail that was possible to know about the Mercury 7 astronauts, and the troubles the United States had in catching up to the Soviet Union in the race to conquer space. This book provides a look at the other side. The story of Yuri Gagarin's history-making ride atop an R-7 missile, the most powerful in the world at the time, gave me a new appreciation for his sheer courage. He changed the world forever, and he should never be forgotten. Walker did an outstanding job of research and writing, and he published it on the 60th anniversary of Gagarin's flight. I highly recommend it to you.

The Great Digital Disconnect

My stepdaughter owns a short-term rental in Bryson City, NC. The unique feature of this unit is that there is no internet, and no decent cell phone signal. She named the house "The Digital Disconnet" and it stays rented all the time. Apparently our digital world, with its 24/7 connection to the universe, is so stressful that a little time away from it all is the mark of a true vacation. I often wondered what it would be like with no digital connection to the outside world. I found out last weekend.

A week or so ago a crew was out in our neighborhood, with their spray cans of paint, marking the locations of electrical, water, gas, telephone, and cable lines. (In Madison, these are all underground.) I knew that some digging was in our future, but I didn't know exactly where. The Thursday before last weekend, I received a text message from Spectrum, our internet provider, informing me that we were in an area of internet outage, but that they were working on it. As I drove into the neighboood, I saw the problem: Georgia Power looked at all those lawn markings, pointed to the one that said "George's Internet," and decided to dig there. The Spectrum truck was in our driveway, but there was precious little he could do until a crew came out to repair the internet cable, which was cut, by the way, in four places. Georgia Power wanted to make sure that I would be without internet.

While waiting on the repair crew, which came Friday, the tech decided to check my modem and the connections down at the junction box in front of my house. The took some cabling apart, looked at it, muttered about how dirty it was, and left it disconnected.

All this was inconvenient, as I had a Zoom meeting with parents scheduled for that evening. I ended up doing the meeting in the cab of my truck, parked within wifi range of the Quality Inn at Madison.

And so passed Thursday night, the evening of the first day without internet.

On my trip home Friday I received a text from Spectrum, telling me the repairs were completed. So I was a bit peeved when I arrived home to find that I had no internet. Yes, the cable had been replaced. No, the tech had not returned to reconnect the cables down at the junction box. I called, and the folks at Spectrum told me I could get an appointment at 5:00 PM. The problem: it would be 5:00 PM MONDAY. I burned up the rest of my high speed cellular data by watching a television show on my phone. At that point we were without both internet and high speed data. The data we did have was at a much reduced speed. It reminded me of the old AT&T EDGE network days.

And so passed Friday night, the evening of the second day without internet.

Saturday we had a festival to work. If you have never attended the Bostwick (GA) Cotton Gin Festival, you do not know what you are missing. My favorite columnist, Salena Zito, recently wrote a column about small towns and their festivals. This festival could have been featured in her column. I love small-town American, and that means I love the little crossroad of Bostwick. Once we had a couple of dozen cotton gins in our county. As far as I know, the one is Bostwick is the only remaining operational gin in Morgan County. It is fascinating to see it run.

We used our credit card reader and app to sell products at the festival. Even on reduced speed, we were able to accept the credit cards offered to us. We returned home, and watched a film noir that I had previously recorded: Touch of Evil, a 1958 Orson Wells thriller. The big inconvenience was not being able to ask Alexa what the weather would be like on Sunday. That and having to drive to the Pilot gasoline station to tap into their internet in order to upload the most recent blog posting.

And so passed Saturday night, the evening of the third day without internet.

On Sunday, the lack of internet became a problem. We are working on a project, and we needed to be able to both upload and download documents. This required two trips down to the interstate: we used the Dunkin' wifi in the morning, then the Pilot wifi in the afternoon. By evening, we were exhausted, but reasonably happy. We have a couple of items to put together to finish the project, but that will have to wait for another day. The dog needed a bath, and that took precedence. We had dinner. We read. We went to bed early.

And so passed Sunday night, the evening of the fourth day without internet.

Monday morning, well before sun-up, I was at school, and received a text message from Spectrum telling me that my internet had been restored, and that I should press "3" in order to cancel the scheduled Monday afternoon visit by my local repair tech. Not having fallen off the turnip truck yesterday, I politely declined to cancel the service call, which was a good thing. When I arrived home, I was still without internet, but my friendly repair tech showed up on time, and an hour or so later, I was back in business. It turns out that the Friday afternoon technician simply failed to reconnect some cables at the junction box in the yard. Had he done so, I would not have gone the weekend without my digital connection to the outside world. The tech checked everything: the junction box, the box on the wall of the house, the connections inside the house. He did a great job. I wish he had visited me on Friday.

I celebrated by watching an episode of “My Life Is Murder” and an episode of “The Americans”. I further celebrated with a dinner of Whoppers (2), Coca-Cola, and vanilla bean ice cream. As you can see, Kathy was out of town.

Thus ended Monday night, the evening of the fifth day without internet.

I've had my digital vacation. The most refreshing part of this vacation was its end.

The Guy In The Basement

I have mentioned in the past that I suffer from tinnitus. A bit more than a month ago, Kathy was outside, chatting with a neighbor, the Gladys Kravitz of our neighborhood. Kathy happened to mention that I have been having trouble with ringing in the ear, and Gladys popped into her house, did a search on her computer, then sent a text to me containing the link you see pictured at the top of this article.

In the event that you cannot make out the details of the photo, it is a photo of a woman with a clove of garlic shoved in her right ear. That’s right: a clove of garlic in the ear.

*Sigh*

In 2018, the US spent on average $14,891 per year, per pupil, for the 12 years of primary through secondary education. The same year, the US spent on average $15,908 per year, per pupil, for post secondary education (college, community colleges, technical schools, etc.), and $33,063 per year, per pupil, for graduate and post graduate education. We spend a ton of money every year on education.

So why do we still have people on this Earth who can be suckered by witch doctor medicine?

And it isn't just medicine that fools people who should know better. Surely you have seen the internet ads that tout some previously secret method for cleaning toilets, or tightening loose skin on the face and neck, or saving hundreds of dollars on automobile insurance, and the like. There have been so many ads featuring baking soda and apple cider vinegar that I no longer even look to see what these two miracle chemicals are supposed to do. I gather, from the ads, that baking soda and apple cider vinegar must solve about 5,237 household problems.

I lay the blame for this gullibility to the nature of our citizens. We are all slightly rebellious, and generally distrustful of authority. So when an internet ad begins with “the major drug companies don't want you to know about this simple cure for [fill in the blank]”, we are naturally inclined to say “Yeah, screw those bastards!” And we end up with some of our citizens walking around with garlic cloves in their ears.

So, where do all these implausible ads come from? I have a theory. I can't prove it. You can't disprove it. In other words, it is a perfect theory.

Somewhere there is this not-quite-middle-aged chap, a college graduate, with something on the order of $100,000 in college loan debt. That is why he lives in his mother's basement. The reason he has made no progress on his student loans, and hence lives in his mother's basement, is that he has no useful skills. His degree is useless. Who needs a degree in the Transgender Anthropology of the Hakowiee Indians, or Critical pre-Columbian Queer Feminist Theory? The poor fellow is bitter: he has no future, and he chastises himself for not majoring in, say, English. At least with an English degree he could go door-to-door explaining Shakespeare for tips. But no, there he is, in his underwear, in his mother's basement, scouring the internet for some porn he hasn't yet viewed.

"Why me?" he asks. “I'm a lot brighter than most of those mouth-breathers who know nothing about Jacques Derrida's contribution to post-structuralism, or Michael Foucault's theory of the historical, non-temporal, a priori knowledge that grounds truth and discourses, thus representing the condition of their possibility within a particular epoch. Why, then, am I such a loser?”

Let me count the ways.

As the weeks in the basement become months, he begins to lose confidence in himself, until he actually begins to sound like John Blutarsky, aka Bluto in Animal House: “Christ. Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the f***ing Peace Corps.”

But then, he has an idea, a brilliant one, an idea that will restore his sense of self-importance. He will show just how stupid the mouth-breathers are. He will come up with the most idiotic ideas he can imagine, post them on-line, and then watch to see the mouth-breathers take the bait.

And that is why we see ads touting garlic cloves in the ear to cure tinnitus, vinegar and baking soda enemas to cure prostatitis, and nonsense like that.

As I noted, it is the perfect theory.

You can buy the theory, or not. But please, PLEASE, when you look at those internet ads that promise the simplest of cures for mankind’s most perplexing problems, stop for a second before clicking on the link, and remember that fellow, in his underwear, in his mother's basement.

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.