It has been such a cold week! Thankfully the sun has been out much of the time and I have been able to needlepoint by my window. I also sent the Review off to the printer. I do love crossing items off my to-do list, don’t you?
I am also making headway reading Drums Along the Mohawk–the 600+-page tome given to me for Christmas. I am more than a third of the way in and I must say, it is wonderful. Published in 1936, it is well-written, exciting, and populated with realistic characters. It is very scary in parts and well it should be. It was a scary time to be on the New York frontier.
“For the first time they began to realize that there was no protection for them except in themselves. An unpredictable force had been born in the Mohawk Valley…”
The book is peopled with historical persons such as General Nicholas Herkimer and Adam Helmer, and other descendants of the German immigrants who were the majority residents in the central Mohawk Valley at the time. It also features such historical events as the Battle of Oriskany.
(Side note: When I was writing the Review article about RADM Courtney Shands, I learned that he was the commander of the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany during the Korean Conflict. The USS Oriskany was named after the famous and bloody engagement during the Saratoga Campaign. Synchronicity!)
Anyway, I am learning a lot and enjoying the book. Of course, young people today never read books like this and it is a shame. They might actually learn something about our country and the pioneers who built it. It was not easy, not easy at all.
Here’s another bit of trivia. Henry Fonda, the star of the film Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), was a descendent of Douw Fonda, (1700–1780) a prominent settler and trader in the Mohawk Valley. During the fighting with Loyalists, he was captured by a Mohawk, tomahawked and scalped. Two of Douw Fonda’s sons, John and Adam, were taken prisoner in the raid and taken to Canada.
Our ancestors were a hardy lot. They had to be.
So stay warm, read some (good) historical fiction, watch an old movie. Be thankful for and remember those who came before you.
Today we celebrate the birth of Charles Monroe “Sparky” Schulz (1922-2000), cartoonist and creator of Peanuts. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential cartoonists in history, and cited by many cartoonists as a major influence. I, of course, have been a fan since the mid-1960s.
Funnily enough, as I get older, I look more and more like Linus…
Linus has always been the character I relate to most (not Lucy as my siblings would argue). There is certainly someone for everyone to relate to in this great classic comic strip. To whom do you relate most?
We also remember that in 1789 George Washington recommended that November 26 be “devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed, for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.”
Well said, President Washington!
In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed November 26 as a national Thanksgiving Day, to be celebrated annually on the final Thursday of November. It has been observed on the fourth Thursday in November since 1942.
Meanwhile I am busy readying my house for precious visitors arriving tomorrow. Thankful for good times ahead and praying for travel mercies tomorrow!
As you know Veterans Day was yesterday and as usual I gave it some thought. I think a lot of Boomers like myself are fascinated with WWII because we grew up with so many WWII veterans–fathers and grandfathers–ordinary men who did extraordinary things.
So I was doing some research about a local man who became an “Ace in a day” on August 7, 1942 at Guadalcanal. Courtney Shands was awarded the Navy Cross for “extraordinary heroism in operations against the enemy while serving as Pilot of a carrier-based Navy Fighter Plane in Fighting Squadron SEVENTY-ONE (VF-71), attached to the U.S.S. WASP (CV-7), in action against enemy Japanese forces on Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, on 7 August 1942. Leading his fighter squadron in the initial air assault on Japanese positions on the Solomon Islands, Lieutenant Commander Shands’ flight destroyed seven enemy fighters and 15 patrol planes. This victory eliminated all local air opposition in the area, thus greatly contributing to the successful occupation of the islands by American ground forces. Lieutenant Commander Shands personally shot down four Japanese fighters and two patrol planes. His outstanding courage, daring airmanship and devotion to duty were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”
A month later in September 1942 Shands was commander of the USS Wasp’s air group when the aircraft carrier was torpedoed and sank in shark-infested waters. The descriptions of this disaster are blood-curdling. At one point Shands was “floating in the water in his “Mae West” life preserver and holding on to an injured man when he saw Lieutenant Ray Conklin helping a wounded sailor down one of the lines and into the ocean. While towing a wounded man toward one of the life crafts, Shands was amazed that Conklin towed his casualty past him “on the double.” The reason for Conklin’s Olympic speed? A shark was following him.”
Courtney Shands from Kirkwood, MO (KHS class of 1923) went on to become a Rear Admiral in the USN.
On this day in 1874 this cartoon by Thomas Nast appeared, featuring the first notable appearance of the Republican elephant.
The Republican Party has changed quite a bit over the years, but I am happy to see it become a real diverse coalition of Americans–the people that make this country great. Truly, the 2024 election is the “revenge of the working class American.” They’re not Nazis; they’re not garbage. Indeed.
On this day in 1849 at a convention in St. Louis’s old courthouse, 800 delegates heard a speech by Missouri’s veteran U.S. senator Thomas Hart Benton. With his customary persuasiveness, Benton launched into a recital of the glories and riches which would come from a transcontinental railway.
Summing up his argument, he pointed majestically westward and cried, “There is the East! There is India!” Expertly phrased, perfectly timed, and dramatically delivered, Benton’s stunning conclusion electrified his audience and strengthened the case for the projected railroads as no other argument had done.
The occasion is preserved in the bronze statue of Benton in Lafayette Park as portrayed by American sculptor Harriet Hosmer. The closing words of his speech are engraved at his feet.
Harriet Hosmer was about 30 years old and living in Rome when she received the commission. She sculpted the statue in Rome in 1861. It was then cast by the Royal Bronze Foundry in Munich in 1864.
The resulting statue is a colossal standing figure of Senator Benton. It stands ten feet tall and is two feet, ten inches wide and deep. Benton wears a classical toga over a contemporary jacket and neck scarf. He is wearing sandals, faces west and holds a partially unrolled scroll of a map with the word “America” on it. Dedicated in 1868, it was the first public monument in the State of Missouri.
The park also boasts a bronze casting from a life-sized statue of George Washington by French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, which was placed in the park in 1869.
Lafayette Park was set aside from the St. Louis Common in 1836 and dedicated in 1851 as one of the first public parks, and by far the largest of its era, in the City of St. Louis, Missouri. It is considered by many historians to be the oldest urban park west of the Mississippi. Indeed, at 30 acres, Lafayette Park is one of the larger parks in the city even though it is still dwarfed by Forest Park which is about 46 times larger.
*Information for this post is from St. Louis Day By Day by Frances Hurd Stadler and the Lafayette Park Conservancy.
While staying on the Navajo Rez in Monument Valley we were reminded several times of the Navajo code talkers of WWII fame. You will recall that this was the ingenious idea of using the Navajo language to write an unbreakable code–one of America’s all-time great secret weapons. After Pearl Harbor, and because the Japanese had broken all the codes previously sent over the radio waves, the Marines were desperate to find a secure way to communicate vital information with precious little time. After several successful tests, the Navajo language was approved as a communication code.
But we wondered, who originally had this brilliant idea?
Well, I looked into this and it was Philip Johnston, the son of a Christian missionary, who had grown up on a Navajo reservation and had learned the language in his youth. In fact, Johnston became so fluent in the (very difficult) Navajo language that he was asked in 1901 at age 9 to serve as an interpreter for a Navajo delegation sent to Washington, D.C., to lobby for Indian rights. Philip was the Navajo/English translator between the local Navajo leaders and President Theodore Roosevelt.
Johnston said he came up with the idea of enlisting Navajos as signalmen early in 1942, when he read a newspaper story about the army’s use of several Native Americans during training maneuvers with an armored division in Louisiana. The article also stated that, during World War I, Native Americans had acted as signalmen for the Canadian army to send secure messages about shortages of supplies or ammunition.
Shortly thereafter, Johnston contacted the military with his idea: “My plan is not to use translations of an Indian language, but to build up a code of Indian words. Let’s imagine this code included terms such as ‘fast shooter’ to designate a machine gun, and ‘iron rain’ for a barrage. Navajo personnel would be thoroughly drilled to understand and use these substitutions.”
I mean, brilliant.
During the course of the war, about 400 Navajos participated in the code talker program. Their hard work was not recognized until after the declassification of the operation in 1968.
President Ronald Reagan gave the Code Talkers a Certificate of Recognition and declared August 14 “Navajo Code Talkers Day” in 1982. President George W. Bush presented the Congressional Gold Medal to the four surviving Code Talkers at a ceremony held in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington in July 2001.
To my knowledge Philip Johnston was never recognized with a medal or special ceremony for his great idea. But hats off to him.
If you would like to read more about this, check this and this out.
Today is the 444th anniversary of the completion of Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the Earth in Plymouth, England on September 26, 1580.
This was the first English circumnavigation, and second circumnavigation overall. Drake’s exploits made him a hero to the English, but his privateering led the Spanish to brand him a pirate, known to them as El Draque (“The Dragon”). “While Spain regarded him as a pirate even then, he was really a privateer, since he carried the royal warrant and the Crown participated by furnishing money and armed ships. That is hardly piracy as we understand it.” (This is an interesting article about Drake.)
I have shared this prayer by Drake before, but it bears repeating:
“Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves, when our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little, when we arrive safely because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess, we have lost our thirst for the waters of life, having fallen in love with life, we have ceased to dream of eternity, and in our efforts to build a new earth, we have allowed our vision of the new heaven to dim.
Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, to venture on wider seas, where storms will show your mastery, where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars. We ask you to push back the horizon of our hopes, and to push us into the future in strength, courage, hope, and love. This we ask in the name of our Captain, who is Jesus Christ. ”
Wonderful.
We also remember Paul Newman, who died on this day in 2008.
Kind of like Sir Francis Drake, Paul Newman is in a league of own. Nominated eight times for Best Actor (and once for Supporting Actor), he only won one Oscar for The Color of Money (1987) and that seemed like a consolation prize at the time. Newman wasn’t even there to pick up his award. C’est la vie. He was great and everybody loved him. Anyway, a toast to the great Paul Newman!
And speaking of cool, how about that new statue at the U.S. Capitol? Johnny Cash, representing Arkansas, became the first professional musician to be honored with a statue in the Capitol.
Cash’s daughter, Rosanne Cash, said her father would have viewed the statue “as the ultimate honor” in his life. She said her father’s hard upbringing instilled in him a strong work ethic and that he loved the idea of America as a place of dreams and refuge. “This man was a living redemption story,” Rosanne Cash said. “He encountered darkness and met it with love.” Amen, brother.
Now there’s three aces! Sir Francis Drake, Paul Newman and Johnny Cash. Woohoo! Have a good day!
I had not heard of the Battle of Iuka, nor of Iuka, Mississippi for that matter, until yesterday. Before the Civil War the town boasted an all-female college, a boys’ military academy and a fine hotel. The Civil War brought widespread devastation when a major engagement took place on September 19, 1862.
Major General Ulysses Grant brought two armies to confront Sterling Price in a double envelopment: Rosecrans’s Army of the Mississippi approaching Iuka from the southwest, and three divisions of his own Army of the Tennessee under Maj. General Edmund Ord, approaching from the northwest. Although Grant and Ord planned to attack in conjunction with Rosecrans when they heard the sound of battle, an acoustic shadow suppressed the sound and prevented them from realizing that the battle had begun.
Now hold the phone, what is an acoustic shadow?!
“An acoustic shadow is an area through which sound waves fail to propagate, due to topographical obstructions or disruption of the waves via phenomena such as wind currents, buildings, or sound barriers.”
I looked up in his Memoirs to see what Grant had to say about this:
“During the 19th the wind blew in the wrong direction to transmit sound either towards the point where Ord was, or to Burnsville where I had remained…A couple of hours before dark on the 19th…the wind was hard and in the wrong direction to transmit sound either to Ord or to me. Neither he nor I nor any one in either command heard a gun that was fired upon the battle-field. After the engagement Rosecrans sent me a dispatch announcing the result. This was brought by a courier. There is no road between Burnsville and the position then occupied by Rosecrans and the country was impassable for a man on horseback. The courier bearing the message was compelled to move west nearly to Jacinto before he found a road leading to Burnsville.”
Boy, the things we take for granted in our tech world today.
Anyway, I thought that was very interesting. And now we know what an acoustic shadow is.
Today is also the anniversary ( in 1863 ) of the first day of the Battle of Chickamauga, in northwestern Georgia, the bloodiest two-day battle of the conflict, and the only significant Confederate victory in the war’s Western Theater. You will recall the short story by Ambrose Bierce about the deaf-mute boy who wanders onto the battlefield.
One sunny autumn afternoon a child strayed away from its rude home in a small field and entered a forest unobserved. It was happy in a new sense of freedom from control, happy in the opportunity of exploration and adventure; for this child’s spirit, in bodies of its ancestors, had for thousands of years been trained to memorable feats of discovery and conquest—victories in battles whose critical moments were centuries, whose victors’ camps were cities of hewn stone. From the cradle of its race it had conquered its way through two continents and passing a great sea had penetrated a third, there to be born to war and dominion as a heritage.
A very grim read, to be sure.
September 19 was also the first day of the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest in 1944, which was the longest battle on German ground during World War II. It is the second longest single battle the U.S. Army has ever fought after The Battle of Bataan. The Battle of Hürtgen Forest has been referred to as a stalemate that consumed large amounts of resources on both sides. Many men died in the freezing cold. The Americans suffered 33,000 casualties during the course of the battle which ranged up to 55,000 casualties, including 9,000 non-combat losses, and represented a 25 percent casualty rate.
J.D. Salinger was there. And I always think of a girl I knew in college whose father was there in the Hürtgen Forest and who returned home after the war and became a mailman in Worcester, MA.
He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. 2 I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”
3 For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence. 4 He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler. 5 You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, 6 nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.
7 A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you. 8 You will only look with your eyes and see the recompense of the wicked.
9 Because you have made the Lord your dwelling place— the Most High, who is my refuge — 10 no evil shall be allowed to befall you, no plague come near your tent.
11 For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. 12 On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone. 13 You will tread on the lion and the adder; the young lion and the serpent you will trample underfoot.
14 “Because he holds fast to me in love, I will deliver him; I will protect him, because he knows my name. 15 When he calls to me, I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will rescue him and honor him. 16 With long life I will satisfy him and show him my salvation.”
Busy, busy weekend! I am now a person who takes naps to survive exciting times.
I went to daughter #1’s first DAR chapter meeting as regent on Saturday morning. She handled it like a pro as I knew she would. (I have transferred to her chapter.)
Of course, I didn’t take a picture of the meeting after it started…c’est la vie. We had breakfast and then the meeting, followed by the program, which she presented: DAR 101. I learned a lot.
I was interested to learn that one early member of our chapter was Dr. Mary Walker, who served as a surgeon during the Civil War. Assigned to the Army of the Cumberland and later the 52nd Ohio Infantry, she was the first female surgeon in the US Army. She was captured by Confederate forces after crossing enemy lines to treat wounded civilians and arrested as a spy. She was then sent as a prisoner of war to Richmond, VA until released in a prisoner exchange. She is the only female to receive the Medal of Honor.
Pretty awesome. She tried to join the DAR in NYC, but they wouldn’t let her in because she wore pants. Yay, Cornelia Greene Chapter for being more open-minded.
Daughter #2 and DN arrived with the prairie girls around dinner time and we had toasted ravioli and daughter #1 opened some presents.
It was a full day.
On Sunday we got up bright and early and went to the early service at church and to Sunday School, then headed home and on to our favorite Wild Sun Winery to continue celebrating daughter #1’s birthday in our favorite style. We were joined by several of her friends (ages 3-96) as well as the boy and his family. A good time was had by all and the rain held off til it was time to go home.
We had quite a sunrise yesterday, due, they say, to the wildfires out west. (Photo from Fox2)
Red sky at morning, sailors take warning, and all that. But the sun shone all day and it warmed up considerably.
Daughter #1 took the day off for her birthday and we went to the Art Museum where we had not been for quite some time–probably since before Covid, as with so many things. It was fun to walk around without it being very crowded and look at all the good and bad art. When I was growing up we lived five minutes away and we went frequently with our Mother. It was free and we would sometimes go for an hour or so after church. We had our favorites to check out. That is still the way I like to go to the art museum–just to wander through and not look at every single painting, reading each description card. So we did that and then we sat outside at Taco Buddha back in daughter #1’s neighborhood and ate lunch. Lovely.
When I got home I worked a little on my article about Gratz Brown, the governor of Missouri after the Civil War. Here’s a fun fact: His granddaughter was Margaret Wise Brown who wrote Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny! Talk about your small world! File that one away in your Trivia File.
I also toasted all those brave Americans who died on September 11, 2001. In past years I have included this video about a fine young man who died in one of the towers helping others and I encourage you to watch it again. He was a lacrosse player and his initials were WRC. It wrecks me every time. Lest we forget.
dual personalities 