Disorderly Conduct

 The pages of the local newspaper often carried news of some lawbreaker causing a ruckus around town and getting arrested. It seems as though the city always employed a policeman, and we know a jail was available to accommodate them if necessary. The city hadn’t been tamed yet from its days as a frontier town.

March 6, 1913 - Winfield Scott was arrested Sunday afternoon by Marshal Dworschak on a complaint sworn by the village president. The charges preferred against him were disorderly conduct, carrying concealed weapons, and the discharging of firearms within the village. The whole fracas rose out of the tapping of a keg of beer in the bunk house near the stock yards Sunday morning, and by afternoon Scotty became hilarious (i.e. drunk) and started in to shoot up the town. He put twelve bullet holes through the pool room doors which caused his arrest. Monday afternoon States Attorney Meade came up from Lisbon and he was arraigned before Justice R. E. Kratt and pleaded guilty to all three charges, and was fined $20 and costs, amounting in all to $35.65. Ben Warner, who was also implicated in the affair, was also arrested on complaint of the village president for violating village ordinance No. 9, that of collecting people for the purpose of drinking intoxicating liquors. He pleaded not guilty to the charge, but the evidence furnished, proved his guilt, and he was fined $10 and costs amounting to $20.10.

Making History: The Storytellers...

 A very recent book review by Douglas Brinkley appearing in The Washington Post caught my eye.  The book  - Richard Cohen’s Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past - had just been stocked at our local Barnes and Noble; I purchased my copy and began reading eagerly. The author’s contends that when all things considered for historical accuracy and objectivity are applied to a work, it still will reflect “the manner of the author.”   

Cohen takes a wide look at historians who have told us how things were at the time of their happening. He doesn’t neglect to mention such non-historians as William Shakespeare who probably has formed more people’s ideas of the past than other writers of history. He considers the accuracy of New Testament Bible authors, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and tells us of such historians as Herodotus and Thucsydides.

He speaks a lot about Winston Churchill who he say was not a historian but a participant recorder, persuasive and widely read. Cohen mentions Churchill’s standing among today’s school children who in a survey thought he was a fictional character, but Sherlock Holmes was historical. Teachers of history obviously have some work to do.

Historians like John Keegan, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Barbara Tuchman get high marks from Cohen. Keegan rates an especially strong section in the book supporting and appreciating his style of research and writing. As a presidential biographer he gives Ulysses S. Grant the highest mark. To be honest, I still have reading to do in this volume, but it is the kind of literature I find interesting and thought-provoking. To wit, note the eggs at the side of the book which we hope will soon hatch with new ideas.

I am on Clay Jenkinson’s mailing list and thought his email today spoke very closely to the subject of Cohen’s book. For the magazine he edits called “Governing” he interviewed a historian Garrett Graff who wrote about the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down. As it stated, “A new history of the scandal claims that famous original reportage was too narrow and missed a ‘weirder, zanier, bigger, and different’ story.” Interesting stuff. Woodward and Bernstein didn’t quite get it all, I guess. And that’s the way with history. New information keeps surfacing and it keeps getting rewritten. I will read on.

Strange Things Done in the Midnight Sun

(Five years ago the following article was published in The Roundup magazine. When I looked at it again, I thought it might interest readers today in this newspaper.)

The auctioneer cried, “Sold, $20!” With a rap of his gavel I owned The Spoilers, a book written in 1905 by Rex Beach. A thinly disguised novel about the North Dakotan Alexander McKenzie. The Spoilers moved into bestseller status the following year. Why was Beach compelled to think the story surrounding this man during the Alaskan Gold Rush was worthy of his attention?

In the beginning, the real-life McKenzie had worked as a bullwhacker and a railroad laborer working westward. Landing at Bismarck, the end of the track for several years, he joined a Hell on Wheels community “crowded with Indian fighting soldiers, ‘bad men’ from down river and railroad gangs from the east.” His doorway into a political career opened in December 1874 after the county sheriff, along with a deputy U.S. marshal, fell through the ice on the Missouri River and drowned. 

To replace the sheriff, the county commissioners turned to the physically imposing McKenzie to quell unbridled crime in what The Bismarck Tribune called the “Wickedist City in the West.” After his appointment, he was elected to the post six more times.

McKenzie made friends and alliances during his lawman tenure, including Clement Lounsberry, publisher of the Tribune. Lounsberry blessed McKenzie’s work in 1877 saying, “Few criminals escape detection when McKenzie gets on their track.” Working with and on behalf of the Northern Pacific Railroad gave him a powerful platform. Prior to statehood in 1889, he deceitfully engineered the removal of Dakota Territory’s capital from Yankton to Bismarck because the railroad planned to go through Bismarck.

If the old maxim is true that absolute power corrupts absolutely, then he can be fairly judged corrupt. Of the state’s first eight governors, only one was not handpicked by the growing McKenzie machine.

The stage in North Dakota wasn’t big enough for the Boss and his imaginative character. The Alaskan Gold Rush drew him like a magnet northward. Not inclined to dirty his hands digging for gold, he took the tack of calling on his connections in Washington, D.C. to appoint his handpicked choice of Arthur H. Noyes as a district judge. Timid and pliable, Noyes could be easily convinced to back McKenzie’s scheming.

They focused wolfish attention on rich lodes developed by Norwegian and Swedish miners after the question arose: Should non-citizens have rights to ownership? Noyes placed them into receivership until “legal” claim could be decided. Of course, the receiver happened to be McKenzie, who banned the rightful owners from setting foot on their claims, then hired workers to mine the gold and hide it.

Enter Rex Beach. Like thousands of others, he had also sought riches in the gold fields at Nome. He failed at prospecting but succeeded in spinning gold when he wrote The Spoilers. Beach recreated McKenzie as a character with a similar-sounding name - Alexander McNamara - while remaining fairly close to the actual storyline. The story caught the attention of the reading public, becoming a best-selling novel in 1906 and attracting filmmakers in a big way. Hollywood filmed it in 1914, 1923, 1930, 1942, and 1955.

It would be difficult to compare the movies one to the other, but the 1942 version starred Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Harry Carey - and even poet Robert W. Service, who played himself in a bit part.

Scott, who usually played Western heroes, acts the part of the antagonist McNamara. Wayne, the good guy, rises in opposition to McNamara and consorts with dance hall girl Dietrich. The movie features arguably one of the best fight scenes ever filmed, lasting more than six minutes before the knockout punch lands. Thirty stuntmen took 10 days to choreograph the saloon’s destruction.

James Michener’s novel Alaska includes the McKenzie story in Chapter Nine, The Golden Beaches of Nome.” Furthermore, after viewing the 1960 movie North to Alaska several times, I’ve concluded there’s a good chance the screenwriters also took inspiration from McKenzie’s misdeeds.

A dependable telegraph system in Alaska was not completed until 1903, rendering communications with the outside world subject to the coming and going of seagoing crafts. That fact meant meant the aggrieved miners had a long wait between the time they could lodge their complaints with an honest judge in California and the final resolution, which did come in their favor. In the interval, complaints filed with Noyes went unheeded and the gold heist continued. The miners could only sit and watch them dig.

Finally, justice arrived when the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco heard the case and determined McKenzie and his friends had refused to return the gold to its owners after being told to do so. It further ordered two deputy marshals to Nome to arrest him and bring him to the court in San Francisco. Found guilty, he began serving a one year sentence.

It paid McKenzie to have friends in high places, men like President William McKinley and railroad magnate James J. Hill. After only a few weeks of confinement,McKenzie began to feign declining health. Friends started applying pressure on McKinley to release McKenzie because his health started to suffer. The president said he had “never before been subjected to such tremendous pressure from influential men as he had been to pardon McKenzie.” McKinley relented and after three months McKenzie walked free. One observer witnessed him “sprinting” to catch the next train out of Oakland.

McKinley appointed a new judge, James Wickersham, to clean up the affair and return property to rightful owners. After studying the matter, Wickersham wrote that McKenzie’s “notorious criminal activities as head of the most flagrant prostitution of American courts known in our history, and his other offenses were all forgiven by the President’s pardon. He returned to North Dakota, where his health quickly recovered its normal condition, and continued in his activities as a leading citizen.”

The era of McKenzie’s influence in the state ended , however, with a strong grassroots progressive movement that turned him and his cronies out of power. He found the energy and the money to build in 1910 one monument to his memory, the McKenzie Hotel in Bismarck, now called the Patterson Hotel.

As much as he had become an offensive man in some quarters, he maintained a loyal following until his death. He received the only state funeral given a non-office holder in history. One further shock came when his will was read. It came to light that he had two separate families, each unknown to the other. Buried in Bismarck’s St. Mary’s Cemetery, his place of rest can easily be found at the largest monument in the cemetery. It casts a long shadow over his grave at sundown.

Rex Beach

Thoughts on my Last Days...

 The pages on my calendar keep on turning and this article just published in Roundup magazine attests to that. My association with the editor of this magazine has been great, but it's not over since I will keep submitting articles to him.

A Lot of Birds

 (Note before reading: People with a weak stomach shouldn’t read any further.)

     One of the area’s historians was a man named Fred Baguhn from the Owego area. I found this story in his papers archived at the State Historical Society.

     In 1876 the passenger pigeons roosted in number so great as to bend down the branches of the trees. Trappers took them in huge nets 59 feet wide and 100 to 300 feet long. Nets were placed on poles ten feet high and arranged to drop at the pull of a string. On a block of wood was placed a pigeon that had been blinded by sewing its eyelids together with a common sewing needle and thread. These were called “stool pigeons.”  

     The technique of this operation was to wait until a large flock of pigeons appeared, coming in the right direction to pass over the spot where the net was set, whereupon the stool pigeons that were perched on the stools would be thrown high into the air. Being unable to see, the birds would fly around in bewilderment until they could find their way to the ground. The incoming flock would thus see their kind flying about and alighting and would follow them to the ground. There would be a scattering of grain leading them to the net, and when a sufficient number of pigeons following this scattered grain to the net, had come under it, it would be sprung, and drop upon them. 

     Of course, their heads projected through the meshes. The trappers then, to avoid mutilation, got on their knees and ambled back and forth across the net picking up the birds and crushing their heads with their teeth. The birds were tied in small bundles for shipment to Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Minneapolis. The two years of large flocks were 1877 and 1878. Early residents of Owego observed that they broke limbs from trees at Pigeon Point, and that with a lantern in the night, they could be clubbed from their perches by the bagful. 

     So if anyone wondered why this area is called Pigeon Point… and where the term “stool pigeons” comes from…

Col. McIlvain

 Col. William W. McIlvain

First Commandant of the North Dakota Soldiers Home

As was common in the early days of Dakota Territory, Civil War veterans looking to make a living in a new, undeveloped region came with the hope to establish themselves. Sheldon had its fair share of veterans, one of whom was Col. William W. McIlvain. He and his wife first settled in Fargo in 1883 while working as a special land agent for the United States government inspecting homesteaders’ claims.

His obituary in the Sheldon Progress of February 10, 1911 credited him with being instrumental with many pioneers successfully settling in the area. The future of farming appealed to him, so the next year in 1884, he and his wife settled on a farm two miles west of Sheldon. A couple of present day farmsteads come to mind where that might have been, but many sites from that day have disappeared, too. He developed the farm into an 800 acre operation, which in horsepower days was sizable. 

The origin of his title “colonel” couldn’t be found, and his only listed ranks found were corporal, sergeant, and 1st lieutenant.  At any rate he joined the 6th Michigan Infantry Regiment in the Union army and fought in some major battles. One of them was the Siege of Port Hudson. A Confederate soldier who had been inside wrote how hungry he and his fellows got. “We eat all the meat and bread in the fort…eat all the beef, all the mules, all the dogs, and all the rats around us.” The 6th Michigan regiment kept them surrounded and hungry for 48 days before they surrendered.

One other battle to mention was the Battle of Baton Rouge in which the Confederates attacked the Union-held capital of Louisiana. It took Union forces by surprise and forced then back until they came within range of Federal gunboats positioned in the Mississippi River. Cannons on the boats were able to provide covering fire and saved the day for Union forces.

While I was taught one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, the following narrative is history and can’t be ignored. This Michigan unit’s discipline weakened and they defied orders at every opportunity. Around Baton Rouge, the unit engaged in profiteering and plundering and burning plantation buildings. Maybe it was to their saving grace that their bravery under fire that speaks well.

A small detachment of the 6th hadn’t fared well with casualties and when outnumbered in an attack, they answered with a bold counterattacking bayonet charge. In their disease-ridden swamp environment a lot of the men were forced to fight when very ill. What McIlvain’s role in any of the negative aspects of the army is not known, but if it was rampant, we can wonder if he resisted with a Golden Rule attitude. We don’t know.

We’ll return to his Ransom County years when he made his home in Sheldon, Enderlin, and Lisbon. While in Sheldon he became established as a farmer andalso engaged in a general merchandise business in Sheldon with his son, Frank. In older age he went to spend the winter with his daughter in Denver and died there on Feb. 1. 1911. It was in his obituary printed in The Rocky Mountain News that stated “He was prominent in the politics of the state (i.e. N.D.)” that a clue to his future success might point. Colonel McIlvain became the first commandant of the North Dakota Soldiers Home.

As his local obituary states “Colonel W. W. McIlvain was the first commandant of the Soldiers Home, which was ready for occupancy August 2, 1893. The many beautiful drives, walks and flower gardens are the result of his handiwork. He, together with his wife as matron, held this position for ten years, when they resigned and moved to Enderlin and purchased their present home where they have resided since.”

***

Baseball season has begun. Baseball stories are filled with statistics and other asides, so who should be talking about them other than a conservative newspaper columnist who writes about the political scene in Washington, George F. Will. His book titled Bunts is filled to the brim with baseball. How about the only pitcher in history whose first name contains all five vowels - Aurelio Lopez or the only pitcher whose last name contains all five vowels - Ed Figueroa.

Everybody loves laughing at Casey Stengel’s utterances. Here Will tells the story of Casey saying, “What about the shortstop Rizzuto who got nothing but daughters but throws out the left-handed hitters in the double play?” Huh?

Casey went on to manage the 1962 Mets when they lost 120 games in their first season. Who knows what he meant when he uttered, “They say you can’t do it, but sometimes that isn’t always true.”

Strange Things Done...

 (This popped up as a memory on my facebook page. It is one of my favorite stories.)

Wolves Captured

 Posted in "Sheldon - Remembering Our Past"

May, 1911 Headline in the Sheldon Progress: Carl Bjugstad captures a large den of young wolves on the Sheyenne last week. 

     That digging out wolves is a profitable business was practically demonstrated last Friday when Carl Bjugstad captured eight of the whelps. Mr. Bjugstad discovered the den along the banks of the Sheyenne and watched his chance to catch them in their den. He says that this was one of the largest dens he has ever discovered and over a half day was spent in capturing them. The whelps were about half grown and put up quite a lively scrap. The county and state each pay a bounty and a nice little sum was realized.

     (Readers today will recognize Carl Bjugstad as the father of Charles and Marty.)

Idioms

 Our English language is cluttered with sayings or idioms that are repeated enough times to feel comfortable in their usage. Consider someone who “knows the ropes.” We use it to describe people who know their way around a job or situation. Its original use goes back to the days when big ships sported huge sheets of sails to catch the wind that propelled them forward. 

A recent “CBS Sunday Morning” program featured a bit about sailing ships. A sailor pointed to all the ropes, 200 different ropes, each having a name, that attach to the sails. Each sailor is expected to learn the name of each, the different knots used in securing them, plus however else they are used. Therefore a competent sailor “knows the ropes.”

We can have some fun by stringing a few idioms together to make somewhat meaningful sentences such as these. I don’t know the original usage that gave birth to them but recognize them for being idiomatic. How about “He spilled the beans when someone threw a monkey wrench into his plans by letting the cat out of the bag, so he stopped beating around the bush,” or “He thought he should keep an ear to the ground instead of always finding himself up a creek without a paddle,” and one more, “After he scraped the bottom of the barrel, he drew the line, took it all with a grain of salt, buried the hatchet, went cold turkey, and then with a big yawn hit the sack.” Readers will agree these examples are a bit extreme.

Some people are quite adept at mixing idiomatic expressions into their regular speech. My college major was English and I know correct English usage, but I’ve always used idioms, sometimes on purpose, but often times without realizing it. Try to talk without using them. Then you realize how ingrained idioms have become. At any rate, my English usage has become a bit rusty (Oops, did I say “rusty?”).

Consider that first idiom - “knowing the ropes” -  in  context by attaching it to a historical character.  I read a lot of history and have just purchased a book called THE TRIALS OF HARRY S. TRUMAN. Truman came to Washington as a U. S. senator from Missouri, served ten years in that position while finding it agreeable and enjoyable, but events occurred to place him in the ranks of major players in world history.

We know he was the successor to Franklin D. Roosevelt as president, but how did he find himself in that position, a position he never sought, a position where he did not “know the ropes.” When FDR decided to run for a 4th term, he chose a new vice president. Two choices stood as front-runners, Henry Wallace and James F. Byrnes, but political problems with each man made him look at other choices. He selected Truman for reasons of being the safest choice.

After the election and inauguration, FDR died after three months into his 4th term to leave the mostly uninitiated vice president to take over. Whether it was his progressing illness, indifference, or a belief he would live forever, FDR never brought Truman into his circle. In fact they met only one time. Then he died, and a stunned Truman took the oath to serve as president. He had to “learn the ropes” immediately since the United States was in the last stages of a great world war. Could Truman rise above the fray? The historian David McCullough wrote in his book TRUMAN how three American generals - Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton - sat sadly speculating on his probable failure, a mood prevalent in the country.

Truman was the only president who never attended college, but not because he wasn’t intelligent. He was intelligent and to bolster his world view he was a voluminous reader of history. He quickly learned the requirements of his position and rose in the ranks of presidents to the “near great” level as determined by historians.

As the war in Europe finally ground down, the Japanese matter awaited its conclusion. Rather than risk deaths of U. S. servicemen in an invasion, he approved the use of atomic bombs which brought the Japanese to terms. 

Truman’s popularity began rising and his confidence grew. After the war’s end he voiced the Truman Doctrine to give political, military, and economic assistance to European countries. In 1948, he promoted the Marshall Plan to generate a European resurgence of industrialization and steered extensive investment into the region.

When the three majors Allied powers - U.S., Russia, and Great Britain - divided Germany, 

Berlin became a focal point after Russia blockaded any supplies going into that city. In answer, Truman said we were in Berlin by terms of the agreement and Russia had no right to change it. The historic Berlin Airlift flew in that city’s requirements for a year over the heads of the Russians until an official corridor provided access.

Truman promoted and successfully saw the United States as a founding member of the North American Treaty Organization. We recognize it easily by its familiar acronym NATO. It is this defensive treaty we hear much of today in Ukraine.

Some readers might think little of Truman and his time in office. I would argue much of what he did was good and is a sterling example of leaving the office of the presidency “knowing the ropes.” He had many skeptics, but many converts. Here is what Winston Churchill said of him: “I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.”

RED FAMINE

      I’ve had a look at the book that comes with some recent promotion - Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum. Copyrighted five years ago, the message it carries applies to today’s war in that country. A few of her statements hit hard.

     Ukrainians’ farm and garden produce along with their animals had been taken from them and a killing famine called Holodomor resulted in 1931-’33. Up to five million of them died. Applebaum states some wrote directly to the Kremlin, asking for an explanation. One of them said “Honourable Comrade Stalin, is there a Soviet government law stating that villagers should go hungry? Because we, collective farm workers, have not had a slice of bread in our farm since January…”

     And in another letter, “Every day, ten to twenty families die from famine in the villages, children run off and railway stations are overflowing with fleeing villagers. There are no horses or livestock left in the countryside…”

     One more, “The famine and its legacy play an enormous role in contemporary Russian and Ukrainian arguments about their identity, their relationship and their shared Soviet experience.”

     Applebaum comes with credentials and experience to produce a relevant book such as this. Among others things, she is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian.

Tidbit from the Early Days

from "Sheldon - Remembering Our Past"

 I like reading about our town of Sheldon and its beginnings. The early editions of the local newspaper contain the most readily available information. Following are a few tidbits gleaned from the pages of the Sheldon Enterprise which later became the Sheldon Progress.

1881 - Frank Connelly stated when a lumberyard was started at Buffalo, he hauled the first load of lumber that started the building of Sheldon. - In another article he told of a man who’d come through the area in November and slept under his wagon for shelter. He had long hair and when he woke in the morning it was frozen to the ground which his companions had to cut through with their knives to free him.

1885 - The freight business of the Fargo & Southwestern is rapidly on the increase. Twenty cars of freight passed through west yesterday…. There is a scheme on foot to connect Sheldon and Fargo by telephone… Prairie schooners are passing westward almost every day. Train loads of emigrants and emigrant movables continue to pass west…. City marshal Sanborn has given some of our hilariously inclined farmer citizens a little wholesome advice lately, in consequence of which they crawled into their wagons and made tracks for home.

 

The WPA files contain first person information about the early days. A Mr. Frank Trumble stated during the winters of 1882-83 there were a few buffaloes out in the sand hills, but most of them had been driven farther west around Bismarck. The prairie around here was covered with buffalo bones, and the people would pick them up and sell them or use them for fuel.

There was a traveling chapel on the Northern Pacific Railroad. It was under the auspices of the Episcopalian Church and held an altar and seating and would be sidetracked in small towns and villages. There it would remain for a weekend or a week or two. Services would be held for the people of the community who otherewise never had any sort of public worship. Mr. Underwood recalls seeing this car in Sheldon twice in the summer of ’83.

1886 - The timbers for the new bridge across the Maple River in Highland Township came last week and were unloaded Saturday and Monday. The lumber came some time ago and is already on the ground…. Chauncey Durgin is putting in an ice box in the White Elephant Saloon.

Business in Mandan

We had business in Mandan yesterday, lunch with Mary’s family, and a visit at the Heritage Center where I  got reacquainted with some of the folks I’d worked with while volunteering there. The pictures included here feature a man who dressed the part in the museum and loved showing off the old car in the lobby. He knew quite a bit about it and said his wife’s grandfather had refurbished it after finding it in a rundown condition.

On the drive home, I saw something I’ve never seen. Coal trains are common on the rail line that parallels I-94, but my wife and I both noticed something very different about this one - it was much longer than usual, twice its usual length. As we drove along we came upon three engines in the middle that seemed to pull and push at the same time. Then as we drove to its head there were two engines powering along. What was the benefit of two trains being hooked together? One engineer in control? The long snake was probably meant to be broken up somewhere ahead, but still I wonder. And waiting at a crossing would’ve taken twice as long.

At the Meet

Our family gathered to watch Lucas compete in a regional gymnastics meet at the SHAC on the NDSU campus in Fargo. His working hard at the sport makes it look easy, but there’s been sweat and injuries along the way. His performance yesterday (Apr 2, 2022) earned him a spot at the  nationals in Reno, NV.

The pictures show all four of the grandkids, and all are doing well for themselves.

Books in a Box

    When my wife said I have too many books lying around. I responded by saying they all fit in a box, honey. There you go again, she said, when are you going to stop calling our house a box?

     This didn’t really happen, I just like the joke. She has quite a collection herself. Between hers and mine they do fit in a “box.” Sorting them for donation elsewhere is an ongoing task, but numbers don’t decrease because more keep coming in. Barnes and Noble gets a fair share of our business, and we also find cheaply priced used books in various places. The libraries in Fargo and Moorhead have kept me well supplied  with many $1-2 books, and when they get overstocked with a used inventory, like now, they were charging only .50 apiece. 

     I recently bought, at full price from B&N, a new book called THE TRIALS OF HARRY S. TRUMAN. Its subtitle calls it The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945-1953. He was president at that stage of my life when I started remembering. An unlikely president, FDR took him as his vice president for political reasons, and thought he couldn’t harm anything. FDR must have thought he’d live forever, but then he up and died leaving Truman to succeed him. 

     People didn’t expect much from Truman, but he went on to earn his “Give ‘em hell, Harry” nickname. His time was marked with dropping an atomic bomb on Japan, firing General MacArthur for insubordination, instituting the Berlin airlift, integrating the military, and more. He was just a common man from humble beginnings who rose to great heights. I have read David McCullough’s excellent history of Truman, but I want to read another historian writing of his life. The book promises incidents and facts of his presidency that I don’t know yet.

     Here are a few of them in the 50 cent category. DARWIN: PORTRAIT OF A GENIUS caught my eye. We still talk about evolution: is it legitimate or did God make it all in a week? Everyone has decided for themselves.  The author points to Darwin’s ancestors, many of whom possessed superior intellect; therefore, he inherited some genetic predisposition. Given only a month to prepare for a voyage of discovery expected to be two years in length, it lasted instead five years. Notes, specimens, new sites all steered him to the conclusions he made when he returned home.

     ALEXANDER HAMILTON: A BIOGRAPHY reminds me he was a founding father of the United States, fought in the American Revolutionary War, helped draft the Constitution, served as the first secretary of the treasury, and was the founder and chief architect of the American federal banking system. He died in a duel with Aaron Burr that his manhood seemed to dictate he had to take part in even though he was opposed to dueling. Up til that time, Hamilton had been a major player in the politics of the country, but as was noted, that event also killed Burr politically.     

     CATHERINE THE GREAT is a name well known in our household because of our membership in the Germans from Russia Association. It is she who invited our relatives in Germany to resettle in Russia and bring a bounty forth from the rich soil. The serfs prevalent among the Russian population were too primitive. She, born a German, knew Russia was backward and that the population needed to be infused with some progressive ideas.

     The last of the 50 centers to add here is A REPORTER’S LIFE: WALTER CRONKITE. The book outlines pretty much what you’d expect from this man who spent his career working with news of the day, but when he came to one point, I sat up to take notice. He attended high school in Houston, Texas where he’d started to notice racial injustice. The father of his girlfriend noted Walter had been making some deliveries for a drugstore in town. As they visited, the father remarked “Nigger boys deliver for them, don’t they?” He went on to add he didn’t know Walter’s parents but was surprised they would let him do that.

     It was a prevalent attitude among his crowd of friends of whom he remarked: “In those high school years I accepted the fact that my friends were inheritors of a culture built on slavery as an economic reality.” Upon reading that I immediately thought of this critical race theory that so much has been made of lately.

     So much to read, so little time! Then there is the book my wife thinks I should read, one I have no objection in doing: A LONG PETAL OF THE SEA by Isabel Allende. Several volumes by this author set on my wife’s shelves.  This one deals with the 1930s Spain that struggled with two forces of government: fascism and communism. It developed into a civil war where the autocratic fascist leader Franco prevailed. I know one person who tried to take up arms with the communist side but was denied participation because of his age. 

     Allende and her family experienced government upheaval in Chile when her family found themselves on the wrong side of the Pinochet military dictatorship. She made her way to the United States and has authored many popular books.

     Well, it’s obvious I’ve got plenty of reading material, so I’d better stop musing over the books and get started.

… …