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I saw G____ on a number of occasions, though I never formally met him face to face. He frequently drove by our house when he escaped the Chicago area, where he lived most of the time, for his "retreat" in the country, the house on the family farm a mile south of us that he inherited from his parents. G____ was a prosperous second-cousin of my mother's, but we didn't really associate with him. My grandmother had no use for him, though I didn't learn that until after her passing. In her estimation, I understand, he was little better than a common hoodlum.
Before he retired, G____ worked for what was then one of the largest conglomerates in the food industry -- until one of the most notorious private equity firms of the heyday of corporate raiding swooped in, cannibalized the company, and in the space of a few months made a Fortune 500 corporation -- poof! - disappear. G____ had retired long before the company met that ignominious end, though. A some point in his career, his job, at least according to family scuttlebutt, had been to travel around South America bribing government officials and greasing the wheels on behalf of his employer, and though, as it turns out, there was nothing illegal in doing that as far as the United States was concerned -- or even in the laws of some of the countries where he practiced his craft - it was more than adequate to offend my grandmother's Baptist moral sensibilities. Anyone who wanted to remain in her good graces did not associate with G____'s kind!
This is a repost of a a piece I wrote a couple of years ago. Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Buffalo Creek, West Virginia dam collapse that killed 125 people, many of them children, on a rainy Saturday morning in 1972. The story begins inside.
When Mrs. d and I bought our first house in the late seventies, a run down farmhouse out in the country about a mile east of town, it seemed as if we had scarcely signed on the dotted line when it was announced that a major multi-national corporation would be building an agricultural chemical plant in our little town. The location for the new facility, it turned out, would be barely a half-mile northwest of our humble abode.
Living downwind of a chemical plant was not something we relished. We liked our old Victorian-style farmhouse and had sunk a lot of sweat into making the ramshackle domicile livable again after years of neglect. We had little inclination to move, but even if we had, an unprecedented collapse in housing prices in the early eighties put us -- in terminology coined for the occasion -- "underwater" on our mortgage and effectively stuck there, chemical plant or no chemical plant. Undesirable though that may have been, it also happened that something else occurred not long after that would ultimately make our situation, though certainly not ideal, at least a little safer than it had been.
... the American economy has created net ZERO jobs. I have seen a way to jump start recovery. And amazingly Jon Huntsman is leading the way. -- Eric Erikson, In Praise of Jon Huntsman
Fellow liberal, we need to have a talk, this is awkward but... you really need to stop fulminating praise for Jon Huntsman.
Yes, he believes in science and you know, only believes gay people are sort of inferior and not complete monsters. But I want you to please understand just one thing. Your affection for Huntsman is far from mutual. Jon Huntsman stands against everything the left believes in and by supporting him in his run, if not with votes then with praise and cash, by taking him seriously, you are not driving a wedge into the heart of the Republican Party -- the Republican establishment would LOVE for the base to get over their anti-science prejudices long enough to cast a ballet for Mr. Huntsman, he is a Free Market fanatic to the core and by building him up you are only giving him and his corporate masters a helping hand along the road to his goal of destroying just about everything you care about.
So please, the next time you here a Democrat gushing about how moderate and reasonable Huntsman is and how don't you wish he was the Republican nominee? here's a few things to think about:
Our little town held its annual fall festival the week after Labor Day. It's a strictly small town affair, featuring a carnival with antiquated rides, enticing only to the little kids. There's also entertainment -- this year it was a sampling of area talent, a change from the past couple of years when we've gotten once well-known entertainers whose star, however brightly it may once have burned, is a cold cinder now. There's a parade, with lots of antique cars and tractors; horses; all the local fire trucks and ambulances; floats sponsored by local churches and organizations; the high school band; and lq smattering of politicians, exclusively Republicans this year, and most of them running for the same redistricted state assembly seat. Way to go, Democrats!
And, of course, there are "The Tents", which house booths where churches and community organizations fund-raise and local businesses hawk their products. You can chow down on some Lutheran barbeque and a slice of homemade pie (packaged with a slip of paper containing a Bible verse, the better to save your sorry soul), or try a pork chop sandwich from the Boy Scouts, cut a deal on a new air-conditioner at the plumbing and heating company's booth, listen to a pitch on the latest products from the beauty parlor or the bank, or otherwise while away the time chatting with those acquaintances whom, though they may only live minutes away, you seem to see almost exclusively at the festival each year. The last thing on anyones mind is sheets flaming tent fabric crashing down upon them. So it was in Hartford, Connecticut in 1944.
In Elk Grove Village, Illinois, early on the morning of Wednesday, September 29, 1982, twelve-year-old Mary Kellerman, like thousands of schoolchildren on any given day, awoke complaining of a sore throat and runny nose. Her parents gave her a capsule of Extra-Strength Tylenol, a common over-the-counter remedy at the time for the cold symptoms she was exhibiting. Shortly after, Mary lapsed into convulsions and within a few hours, the young middle-schooler was dead. She was only the first.
The boat was to tarry at Memphis till ten the next morning. It is a beautiful city, nobly situated on a commanding bluff overlooking the river. The streets are straight and spacious, though not paved in a way to incite distempered admiration. No, the admiration must be reserved for the town's sewerage system, which is called perfect; a recent reform, however, for it was just the other way, up to a few years ago--a reform resulting from the lesson taught by a desolating visitation of the yellow-fever. In those awful days the people were swept off by hundreds, by thousands; and so great was the reduction caused by flight and by death together, that the population was diminished three-fourths, and so remained for a time. Business stood nearly still, and the streets bore an empty Sunday aspect.
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883)
In late July of 1976, a number of attendees at an American Legion convention at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia suddenly fell ill with a mysterious, pneumonia-like illness that would quickly kill 34 and require over 220 to receive medical treatment.
Public health officials scrambled to identify the disease and isolate its cause, and although the malady -- quickly labeled "Legionnaires' Disease" in popular parlance -- was ultimately determined to be a non-contagious infection caused by bacteria proliferating in the condenser coils of the hotel's air-conditioning system, for several tense days the public watched with apprehension, contemplating the prospect of an un-treatable killer contagion spreading unchecked across the country on an epidemic scale. Americans had not had to confront such a thing for a very long time.
It is difficult to know with any certainty what was going through the minds of the men gathered on Wall Street that day. It was not the kind of meeting for which minutes are taken or a written record preserved, and I'm not the kind of person to try to "get inside the heads" of long-dead people. I don't know what feelings the members of the Manufacturers' Association were experiencing when they met to discuss how to respond to the emergency fire protection rules for their factories that had been laid down by Fire Chief Edward F. Croker in March, 1911, but I will speculate that panic wasn't among those feelings. They had too many contacts in the Tammany organization, too many public officials who, while perhaps not corrupt, were at least beholden to them, owed, to some degree, their offices to them. And plenty who believed, as a judge had told women strikers arrested during the Uprising of the 20,000 a few months before, that such interference in commerce was "against God and Nature".
There were still plenty of favors to call in, markers to cash, and arms to twist before there was any need for panic.
It's been so long since I paid any attention, so long since it made any difference, so many years since I had any choice, that I didn't know, and had to run out the garage to check. On my 1995 Ford Ranger, it's still there; on my wife's 2005 Honda Accord, it's not. In that difference, as they say, lies a tale.
I'm reclined back in the passenger seat, eyes closed, the slap of the wipers and the drumroll of road spray off the tires splattering against the floor pan providing background as Randi Rhodes harangues a conservative caller who thought he'd come up with the perfect squelch to the tirade against the Bush administration Randi has been on for the last half hour.
The half-frozen slush we were driving through earlier has turned now to a solid drizzle of rain. I venture to open my eyes and steal a peek at the gray overcast. The disturbing scallop of darkness in the upper-right quadrant of vision in my right eye is still there, but it hasn't gotten any worse.
We are on I-80 between La Salle and the Quad Cities. There is still a long way to go before we get to Iowa City; we are going to be horribly late. I knew the ETA the nurse at the ophthalmologist's office had given them was spectacularly optimistic, and the road conditions have only made it worse.
Mrs. d is at the wheel. She senses I'm alert and smiles at me. "Well, Mr. d, life with you has certainly been an adventure."
I return a weak smile. "I guess I'm just not put together very well, Dear."
As eastern Europe deals with the toxic spill resulting from a waste reservoir failure at a factory in Hungary that killed nine and spilled 35 million cubic feet of waste from aluminum production and drained a river of red sludge into the Danube, it seems like a good time to take a look at one of our own, similar disasters.
It's an event that has come untethered in memory, ambled about, and plopped itself down in a place it doesn't belong. The incident has taken up residence in a much later time frame than it possibly could have happened. Based on my personal circumstances associated with the incident, it could not possibly have been earlier than late November, 1969, and based on the historical record it had to have been no later than mid-1970. It was shortly before a major holiday, so almost certainly had to have been December, 1969, yet the sulci on my brain stubbornly resist my attempts to herd it back into that pen.
Whenever the incident occurred, I remember it being one of those late fall or early winter central Illinois days when temperatures are pleasant enough during the day but drop precipitously when the sun goes down. I was dressed for "pleasant enough during the day"; it was now well past sunset and I was cold.
dsteffen, Mrs. d has not hesitated to point out for nearly forty years now, has no sense of fun. It has always, therefore, seemed somewhat incongruous that for most of those forty years the planning and organizing of fun family activities has been left in the hands of fun-impaired dsteffen. With totally predictable results.
But no more. This year -- with no kids around home anymore to complain about how bored they are, how lame this is, how they didn't want to come in the first place -- Mrs. d has decided to seize the bull by the horns and lay claim to the fun-planning mantle for herself. The itinerary will be set, necessary reservations made, and dsteffen will be informed when to be ready and what to wear.
Works for me.
The first item on Mrs. d's agenda of Fun Stuff to Do? We'll be heading up to Chicago in a few weeks and board an excursion boat for some sight-seeing on Lake Michigan. All I can say to that is,
For the benefit of anyone who has spent the last few weeks living under a rock, Sue Lowden, Harry Reed's GOP opponent in the upcoming senatorial election in Nevada, suggested people barter with their doctors for their healthcare. A member of the news media, assuming she meant to say "bargain" rather than "barter", gave her the opportunity to clarify her statement, and got more than he bartered bargained for:
You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor. They would say, 'I'll paint your house.' I mean, that's the old days of what people would do to get health care with your doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I'm not backing down from that system.
Step on across the fold with us and we'll take a look at the olden days when you really could pay a doctor with livestock, and observe a little lesson of the "you get what you pay for" variety.
