McCain, Please go home.

Today Senator McCain (R-AZ), the same who blessed us all with the Palin Family, roused again from senatorial stupor to attack Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, regarding his position on DADT and his acceptance of a lengthy study by the Army suggesting that most service personnel couldn't care less about whether the guy or gal on a mission with them was gay.

Now it's the study itself that is flawed?

Why are we still listening to this aged one-issue Senator who consistently proclaims his love for all things military and claims the right to speak for them?

I have tremendous respect and admiration for the Senator's service, which consisted of completing Navy Jet Flight Training and surviving years of torture and isolation in a POW camp. He was retired from the Navy as a Captain, a good deal less rank than that of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, whose military credentials he was questioning.

For the life of me I cannot see how McCain's experiences make him competent to set military policy or order military affairs, or even to order men.

This is all just too ridiculous. We have so many real problems And McCain is still wringing the last shred of juice he has out of this rag??

I just wish McCain would go home. Other people go to Arizona and retire, why can't he? I also wish he could put Sarah Palin and her family back into what ever box he found them. I wish we could hear from real people, and there are some, with relevant ideas to listen to.

Memoirs-A Family in Luck

A Family In Luck

Even in those postwar 1940’s and ‘50s years posthumously stamped with the imprimatur of “the good old days” and the “true period of American family values” our family was not a storybook family. Well into late adulthood we, the get of the strange pairing that became our parents, railed at the Scot's harshness of our mother while holding the gentle amiableness of our father in utter contempt.

Like most ungrateful children, and all children are ungrateful, our every failure and disappointment was laid at their feet.

But then none of my friends had a story book family either and even within the tensions and failures of our own family I knew that we were luckier than a lot of other people.

Our neighborhood, in those years, was a quiet one with every third house being inhabited by a single woman or women. The three Ostertag sisters never married. Beaulah Rittermeyer never married. Mrs. Faucett was a widow, as was Mrs. Mathews, Mrs. Rientschler, Mrs. KirkPatrick, Mrs. O’Dell, Mrs. Crabtree and poor Mrs. Gallup whose husband, driven mad, it was said, by the death of their infant son, lived out his life at the St. Joe Asylum for the Insane. Shieldsy, a family friend, and Poppy lived quietly with Poppy’s damaged lungs..he was gassed in France during WWI… and visits from their daughter and occasionally one of their sons.

It was not a particularly bad neighborhood nor was it a particularly good one. Just a conglomeration of people whose generation, scarred and manipulated by two world wars, an influenza pandemic, (a 1918 global disaster in which 28% of the U.S. population suffered, and 500,000 to 675,000 died), a depression, a land killing drought, and in some instances, the struggle to figure out the ground rules in a new country or how to live after losing everything, lived their lives.

Three of my peers ..in the neighborhood… were victims of habitual incest, two of my closest friends lived on dirt floors, one of whose mother was severely mentally challenged, childhood entertainment at the home of another friend consisted of hiding behind the sofa and watching her mother entertain her men friends and the one friend I had whose family came closest to belonging to a storybook family..because they were catholic and attended church en masse.. lived, as did her mother and siblings, in real fear of her Irish father who liked to use his fists on them.

Three of my friends were raised in what was then referred to as basement houses, one of which had no partitions and one bed for a family of ten. These were simply basements upon which a house had never been built.

The boy that I was later to marry grew up, with his five brothers, in a basement. Stacked at night on pole beds to keep dry when it rained because the basement leaked so badly. They could tell you about wading through inches of water, carrying their shoes, to reach the door and starting for school without breakfast and with lunch (which was called dinner back then) just a fantasy someone else dreamed up.

But the biggest difference in the lives of my family and that of my peers was in the matter of entertainment.

We went places. We did things.

Wound together like a snarled ball of scratchy wool yarn harassed by an ill-tempered cat..we went places and did things.

Every summer we made our pilgrimage to Swope Park, home of The Kansas City Zoo and the infamous Swope Lookout. Often caravanning …the washtub with the watermelon, a jug of tea and a couple dozen bottles of Coca Cola and Nehi pop (orange for me, grape for my brother, Merle and Crème Soda for sister, Marion, with tea and Coke for the older people) in someone's trunk and the packed food boxes in another, we always made one stop on the highway at Leimkuhler’s Gas Station and Ice-house to buy a 25 pound block of ice to be chipped over the watermelon and pop and covered snugly with a gunny sack.

We went to the show at the Armour regularly, partly for the movie and more importantly for the newsreels. We went to Nelson’s, the neighborhood tavern/dance hall. We were regulars at the skating rink.

In the summer we would not have missed going to Winnwood Lake each weekend with it’s free show, outside dance floor and the multicolored juke-box that blared boogie woogie until mid-night, not to mention the on-grounds carnival. Occasionally we swam in the man-made lake but only when one of my sisters had a swimsuit to show off.

In the autumn and through the winter we were regulars at The Brush Creek Follies, a country music show that appeared regularly at the Shriners Temple Auditorium in Kansas City. We saw the young Minnie Pearl and Tex Ritter and Red Foley, Tiny Tim (who wasn’t tiny at all) and Herb Kratoska and Tex Owens and his daughter Laura Lee whom I was named after. Many of these entertainers became friends of the family and were guests in our home.

My parents knew personally members of the The Texas Rangers, a western harmony group franchised to KMBC Radio in Kansas City during that time. Among other things they did a noon-time music and news thing that we never missed. One of my earliest memories is being held high in Mother’s arms so I could listen to the little plastic radio on the shelf on the kitchen wall while the Texas Rangers sang Pony Boy (my favorite song) and dedicated it to me, little Nanie Stock.

There was a lot of spur-of-the-moment stuff. Someone would have an idea and off we would go! Like the time they installed the searchlight at the waterworks in North Town!

One night all of a sudden, off to the South West, a huge shaft of light, inspired by the great search lights over London during the War, swept the night sky. It was awesome..nothing short of miraculous. We all jumped in the car and off we went to see the actual item. There it stood. A huge beam of light seemingly coming right out of the ground there in front of the Water Works building! Piercing the sky farther than even the mind could see! Standing there in that family, dressed in varying degrees of shabby, we were one in our awe, connected like no other family.

It seems to me that this was our real story..…we ran and flew and crashed and rose to run again....like a kite with long tails, everyone clutching..no one allowed to let go. It's true, you don't choose your family. It is the luck of the draw.

But in many ways that mattered we were a family in luck!

The Influenza Pandemic of 1918

The life and times of my Mother and Fathers’ generation was filled with so many stupendous life-changing disasters that the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 has become less than a blip on the radar.

The speed of this pandemic, so deadly, striking so quickly and disappearing as quickly (it lasted about 18 months), made it easier to forget the proportions of the tragedy it inflicted.

But the shortest stroll through any cemetery of that day reveals the flotsam of family tragedies marked by the headstones of young adults. “Rebecca Morris..1895-1918 “Mother and Wife.” “Jerome Patterson… Beloved Son..1902-1918” and on and on.

In the United States about 28% of the population suffered, and 500,000 to 675,000 died.

Kansas City and St.Louis, Missouri were particularly hard hit.

State officials first reported on the presence of influenza in Missouri on October 11, 1918. However, influenza had appeared in the state long before that date. By the third week of October, 3,765 influenza cases and 90 deaths had been reported from St. Louis, with 558 cases and 13 deaths being reported for October 16th alone. State officials, however, rarely had access to accurate figures and the actual number of cases and deaths was probably higher than that.

On October 24th, state officials maintained that "conditions are either stationary or improving" in the state. But on October 25th, the situation took a turn for the worse. Influenza began spreading into rural districts. Between October 26th and 28th, the situation continued to be dire, with rural and urban areas across the state reporting high numbers of cases and deaths.

This Pandemic, targeting the future of populations by striking hardest in the young adult age group, is seldom even regarded when considering the devastations of a worldwide drought, the worldwide economic collapse and two world wars.

Yet the loss of so many in their most productive years must have left a gap. So many orphans, so many unformed families, so many crippled lives, so many losses. And as in all losses, the true cost is never known because it IS lost..not to be regained.

I have spoken to adults left orphaned by this disaster. Their lives, and the lives of those who took them in, were altered and invariably diminished. Being an orphan in the first half of the 20^th century was not an easy thing.

If a Pandemic of this proportion struck today the world would be in an uproar.

*************************

Great Resistance From Troops Against Vaccinations:

"Camp Dodge, Iowa, May 1.—Elmer N. Olson, of Goodrich, Minn., a soldier in training here, refused to submit to vaccination. He was tried by general court-martial and sentenced to fifteen years in the disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth."

1918-19 Influeza in Great Britain: survivor statement as an adult.

In early 1919 my father, not yet demobilized, came on one of his regular, probably irregular, furloughs to Carisbrook Street to find both my mother and sister dead. The Spanish Influenza pandemic had struck Harpurhey. There was no doubt of the existence of a God: only the supreme being could contrive so brilliant an afterpiece to four years of unprecedented suffering and devastation. I apparently, was chuckling in my cot while my mother and sister lay dead on a bed in the same room.

Winston Churchill:

on the Influenza Epidemic of 1890

“For though it ravaged far and wide

Both village, town and countryside,

Its power to kill was o’er;

And with the favouring winds of Spring

(Blest is the time of which I sing)

It left our native shore.”

The Day Bud Killed the Goose

On the Sundays of my childhood the table was always stretched to the limit with extra plates and extra people, neighbors, stray relatives, kids kicked out by their more discerning parents, friends and often the unsuspecting prey of one of my older siblings.

On these occasions the menu was expanded to surpass the ordinary weekly suppers of meatloaf, beans and ham, tuna and noodles, goulash etc. This added Sunday touch usually meant a trip to the back yard for somebody, hatchet in hand, to do in a chicken or two or even on rare occasions a duck. They were quickly scalded, plucked had a little cold water run over them and popped into the skillet if young enough and if not, sentenced to serve considerable time in the oven. This kind of menu, with Mom’s biscuits and gravy and anything scrounged from our ill-cared-for garden, could be stretched a long way and always was.

Not a member of our family reached adulthood without acquiring the skill to look at a platter of chicken, mathematically determine the number of pieces divided by the members of the board, so to speak, and know without asking how many pieces or what piece would be their lot. The old saying ”I get the neck of the chicken..” did not come out of thin air. Merle and I generally got the wings.

The day Bud, the newest and, on this occasion most unfortunate, member of our coterie of friends, was charged with killing the goose, I was very uneasy. In the first place I was sorry to kill the goose, even if we had worked our way through all the chickens for the year. He was not a bad old goose and liked to follow me and my brother around. I would miss him.

And then Bud was a novice at goose killing. That worried me a little. To me, even with his sleeves rolled up, Bud looked awfully dressed up for goose killing. He was not and never became, a country boy. He came courting in the dress of the day, that is a white dress shirt, neat grey slack pants and shiny brown oxford’s. I sure hoped he wouldn’t get goose blood on his good shoes.

But what I should have been worrying about was my brother, Merle. Merle was what you might call accident prone.

The goose was easy to catch. Like everything else in the backyard in hopes of handouts better than their regular fair of dried up grass hoppers, half cracked walnuts and June bug grubs, he followed anyone who made the mistake of going out there. He never seemed to catch on to the Sunday dinner thing.

With Merle in the lead and the goose under his arm we angled down the path, through the weeds, to the spot where the chickens were generally killed. There past the cinder pile and under the walnut tree was a big rock.

The general run of things was that someone would hold the victims legs while someone else stretched the neck out over the rock and someone else swung and whacked. Miraculously on rare occasions, if pressed for time, Mother was able to single handedly do the deed and be scalding and plucking in half the time. But for the rest of us it took three people. It was not a pretty sight and I don’t think any of the victims liked it.

I know Bud didn’t. I don’t think Bud had ever killed anything in his life and I’m sure he never did again. His mistake was he was just not forceful enough! His first whack missed completely causing Merle’s hand to slip on the goose’s squirming neck. Just as he was taking a second swing Merle let go to get a better grip, just in time to get his thumb in the way.

Missed the goose again..got the thumb. Blood spurted..not goose blood..all over the shiny shoes. I forgot I wasn’t supposed to cuss and said “Damn, Bud.”

I glanced up to see if he was mad about the blood thing or the cussing thing and he didn’t look mad but his face was whiter than the goose. I think he would have passed out if he hadn’t been afraid of falling on top of the goose and Merle’s bloody thumb.

Merle sucked on his thumb and hollered, “Hit him again” and Bud did and the goose was dead, or at least trying to be. He was harder to catch dead than he had been alive..flopping around in the tall grass.

Merle finally got hold of him and we hung him up to bleed out before taking him in to Mom. Merle stayed with the goose but I felt like Bud needed someone worse than the goose did at that point. Anyway, he let me hold his hand all the way to the house.

He continued to date my sister and turned out to be a great brother-in-law. We loved him dearly. After all, you can't hold one little accident against a person.

Airport Patdowns

Maybe because I don't have a dog in this fight and seldom fly I am thinking we are feeling sorry for the wrong people for the wrong reasons here! There are two people involved in these little docudramas, the "pattor" and the "pattee"!

The next time you find yourself in the boarding call waiting area look around at your fellow travelers and pick at least three whom you would like to stand face-to-face with and whose armpit, cleavage and crotch you would be willing to stick your hand into, even if it was gloved.

I'm not surprised that some travelers, finding this procedure embarrassing and degrading, are in revolt. I'm also not surprised that the pattors are not. They cannot afford to revolt. They need the job.

So I guess my sympathy leans toward the pattor charged with conducting the pat downs in the face of crappy verbal abuse, jokes that would make you cringe and the contempt of people who ought to know better...or at least behave better.

Ski Season

I hear it’s skiing weather again and I am all for it! True, here in the glacier scraped flatlands of North Missouri skiers are a rather insignificant part of the sporting population..unlike deer slayers, turkey hunters, rodent trappers, cat-fish snaggers and such..but I have fond memories of the skiing world.

Yes, I have skied. At one point in my life, in those insanity driven days of somewhat youthful motherhood, thinking it would serve to prepare them for “life beyond”, I often bombarded my suffering children and grandchildren with experiences over which I had no control. (Other than the ordinary day to day stuff over which I also had no control.)

The Great Ski Trip was on the list and I remember it well……we were living in Henry County back then and…

**************

The planning stage of this trip had gone well, I thought. Kathy, at Clinton’s “Going Places” travel agency had done a great job for us. Also there was a lot of communication beforehand. I remember a conversation with my oldest son, Les, calling from his home in Kansas City.

“Well, Hi, Son. What’s up?”

“Nothing much. I just called to see what you were wearing to ski.”

“Oh, something warm I guess. You know how I hate to be cold. Something warm and lots of it.”

“Well, why don’t you let me pick you up something up here in Kansas City? How about ski bibs? (snowpants for big people)

“Well, I kind of thought I might wear my snowsuit. You know. The one I got the winter we kept the hogs.”

A long silence here. I think he was trying to remember what my snowsuit looked like.

“Mom, I don’t think they are wearing too many snowsuits on the slopes. Why don’t you let me pick you up some bibs? What color is your jacket?”

“I don’t know. Just a minute.” I had to lay the phone down to get to the side of the house where the window by the basketball hoop was.

“John, what color is that coat you said I could borrow?”

He said it was brown.

“It’s brown,” I tell Les, “Brown with tan arms. I remember now.”

Another silence. This conversation was beginning to drag.

“Mom, I don’t think they’re wearing too much brown anymore.”

By now I was getting bored and changed the subject. I hate conversations that don’t seem to be going anywhere.

Later, I had to admit, the kid was right. We didn’t see too many people in shiny-blue snowsuits. Mostly they wore matching mauve, pink, blue, yellow or gray ski suits with little square bottle warmers velcroed to their backsides.

My son turned out matched up like an advertisement for Johnny Walker, with gray ski bibs and matching jacket, gray and mauve-rimmed goggles and mauve and gray eiderdown gloves. The kid had turned into a yuppy!

At ski school my youngest son, John, and three of my nine grandchildren, Sean, 13, Stephanie, eight..(or maybe nine), Chris, nine..(or maybe eight,) and I struggled with “pies”, (that’s keeping the front of the skis in a pigeon-toed position), stopping, (anyway you can,) and “getting up off the ground.”

According to ski types there is an acceptable way and a disgusting way to get up. I tried to master the first, which involves tucking your knees under you and raising yourself with your arms. During this process I noticed that a disproportionate amount of body weight had recently and mysteriously settled below my waistline.

I opted for the disgusting way and you don’t want to hear about it.

We survived ski school and by afternoon were on Schoolmarm Trail a gentle trail designed for grandmothers in blue snowsuits and small children.

I only fell four times! I was ecstatic! What did it matter that I took the slope in the pie position? I could ski!

We stood in line to buy lunch and another to get a table to eat at. The only time we had a table to ourselves the whole weekend was when Chris threw up during a rest period the first day. I guess it was the altitude.

The next day, still beaming over my accomplishment on Schoolmarm Trail, I scrambled up the shuttle-bus steps in my overstuffed snow suit expecting another day of success on skis.

But it was not to be. This mountain was different. This mountain was not kind. My “pies” did not hold. My skis kept crossing, sending me somersaulting downwards and crossways.! If they didn’t cross I built up too much speed and bounced from snow bank to snow bank!

I was miserable.

At this point my son, the Yuppy, turned into a cross between the Nordic Ski Patrol and Ghengis Kahn.

“Use your downhill ski! Turn! Turn! Don’t lay in the trail! Get up! Use your downhill ski! Turn! Turn! Don’t lay in the trail!”

Like Erma Bombeck, I tried to remember those days before he was born and why I had wanted a child. There must have been a reason but I couldn’t think of any.

I fell seventeen times before I stopped counting. It was getting very tiresome. I was getting very angry. My son was beginning to exhibit signs of embarrassment I hadn’t seen since he was a teenager.

I tried to look at things from his point of view.

Yes, it must be embarrassing to look down at your fat little mother, in her out-dated snowsuit, groveling in the snow. Yes, I could understand that. Thinking of his problems helped me put the whole thing in perspective.

Calmly removing my skis I announced that I would walk to the next spot on which I felt competent to ski. “When pigs fly,” I muttered into the zipper tab of my snow suit.

By the look on my sons face you would have thought I had suggested trussing up my grandchildren and using them for snowshoes!

“Nobody walks on the mountain,” he says.

“I walk on mountains,” say I.

“Nobody walks on the mountain,” he says.

“You said that, Boy. You’re wrong. I walk on mountains,” I said.

“It’s against the rules,” he says. “Nobody walks on the mountain.”

“You know what they can do with that rule?” I say.

He looked at me and started to say something but didn’t. I think he was remembering the time I threw the chair at him for torturing his sister.

I walked down the mountain.

…But I DID SKI! For one day..I DID SKI!

Can We Do It?

As George Washington lay dying, strangling on his own phlegm and unable to swallow, he agonized over the future of the new country he was so instrumental in creating. The week or two prior to his sudden illness was spent thoughtfully preparing a statement to the nation on the danger the new country faced. It was never to be completed.

Not for the first time, and certainly not the last, the new government, imperfect and embryonic as it was, stood ready to crumble and slide back into the old European mold of violence and privilege.

It was, of course, a matter of money. Of who had access to it and who did not. Bankrupt and debt ridden, the new government had turned to the genius of Alexander Hamilton, a bastard son of a Scots, West Indian planter and whose claim to financial aptitude was as bookkeeper of a West Indian Island store. Within weeks Hamilton had hammered out a financial system that, with the help of Salomen and other financiers, allowed the new government to stay afloat.

A glaring problem with Hamilton’s system was that it pretty much invalidated the continental scrip in which the men who had actually fought the war had been paid,, therefore leaving them penniless, while the men who had benefited greatly by the money changing hands, as it always does in war time, gained exponentially. In short it was paid for by the poor who had already been robbed of most of their livelihood for the years it took to win the war.

Tom Jefferson, that radical dreamer, and the stubborn genius of the little James Madison weighed in hard against this usurpation of the wealth of the “common man” with limited success.

And thus the new government fell into two factions, The Federalists, who believed only those with access to capital had the intelligence and no-how to govern and the Democrats, who had great faith in “the common man.”

Upon hearing of a plot by the Federalists to wrest the control of government from the people who had fought for it by instigating an electoral tie, and forcing an appointment of one of their own, Andy Jackson, out in Tennessee, called up 100 of his militia followers and prepared to march. The governors of both Virginia and Pennsylvania threatened to take similar action.

Compromises were made, deals were cut, the fragile new government survived.

Down through the years the two-party system has continued its ebb and flow, the struggle between privilege and poverty, the powerful and the disenfranchised.

The adversaries names and their agendas have altered and clouded at different points in history but the basic questions have remained the same. Can we do it? Can ordinary people govern themselves?

And secondary but of supreme importance is the question; Is the purpose of government to protect the material wealth and opportunity in the hands of the few, the strong, the quick? Or is it to maximize the welfare and the opportunity of the many?

Time after time in our history this country has been torn down the middle, seemingly hopelessly divided.

The question of slavery threatened to strangle the new government in its crib. Only by kicking the can down the road to the next century did the founding fathers reach agreement.

News of the French Revolution and its excesses set neighbor against neighbor once again. Thugs roamed the streets of our port cities filling the taverns, threatening private businesses, ready to club and annihilate those of opposing views.

The Indian question, later settled so violently and illegally by Jackson who, defying the order of the U.S. Supreme Court, drove the Indians from their rich Georgia farms, split the country once again. The Louisianna purchase was derided and railed against as being an irresponsible assumption of debt the new nation could not afford. The purchase of Alaska, known as Seward’s folly, after the Senator who accomplished the acquisition of that distant and frozen wealth, divided Congress and the country.

And when the chickens came home to roost on the question of slavery and the right of a state to override the laws of the federal government finally had to be settled, our worst nightmare as a nation came to pass in the Civil War, leaving scars still apparent in our political and social system 150 years later.

In both World Wars this country argued the question of "Who's Side Are We On?" In both wars the reaction of our large German immigrant populations and the capitalists who made deals with German munitions companies had to be considered.

In 1940 FDR was fighting to resist tremendous Congressional and industrial pressure to get into the war ON THE SIDE OF THE GERMANS. Henry Ford personally demanded that the President plunge the country into support of the AXIS.

Desegregation rewrote the political landscape and set up a social and political division that has lasted for decades.

We have always been divided. We have always suffered fools. Greed always corrupts. Mediocrity and ignorance have always been celebrated in segments of our population. Good has not always triumphed. Justice is often delayed. Do these current divisions and celebrations of ignorance and crippled vision exceed our capacity to sort things out?

I don’t know. I do know that the question is, as it always has been;

Can we do it? Can ordinary people govern themselves? Is the purpose of government to protect the material wealth and opportunity in the hands of the few, the strong, the quick?

Or is it to maximize the welfare and the opportunity of the many?