U.S. Army General Frederick C. Weyand, for the U.S. forces, stated: "Our mission has been accomplished,"
General Cao Văn Viên, for South Vietnam, stated to the departing U.S. troops: "We are going to do everything we can to see that your great sacrifices were not in vain."
The sentiments were no doubt sincere, but the mission had not really been accomplished and the sacrifices would have to be qualified. We took a look at the war in that fashion here:
General Cao would go into exile in 1975 with the fall of South Vietnam, and died in 2008 at age 86 in the United States. Gen. Weyland died in 2010 at age 93.
The war effectively destroyed the combat capabilities through moral decay of the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy. The Marines and the Air Force came through it much less impaired. The lessons learned caused the post Vietnam War military to abandon conscription, something it had relied upon since 1940, and a wholesale return to the pre World War Two volunteer/National Guard based force, something that has been a success. It would take several years for the Army and Navy to return to combat effective, but it happened much quicker, with the volunteer force, than might have been guessed. By the early 1980s, the service had been effectively restored and the damaging impacts of the Vietnam War largely put behind it.
The war would have a lingering effect on the military in other ways, of course, perhaps one of the most visual being the adoption of the M16 to such an extent that it has obtained record longevity, in spite of being a widely hated weapon by troops of the era.
Today In Wyoming's History: March 29 By odd coincidence, this is also the day that Lt. William Calley was sentenced in 1971 in a courts-martial for his role in the My Lai Massacre, although his prison sentence ended up not being a long one.
Also on that day, the second to last group of US POWs left Vietnam. The last POW to board the aircraft out of North Vietnam was U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Alfred H. Agnew.
Somehow oddly emphasizing the spirit of defeat at the time, the well regarded television drama Pueblo, about the North Korean capture of the USS Pueblo, aired on television. Only tangentially related to the war, it was impossible not to notice that North Korea of that era felt that the US was so impaired that it could get away with this, which it did.
It would not, now.
And making the day all the worse, President Nixon set a maximum for prices that could be charged for beef, pork and lamb. This was in reaction to a consumer revolt in which consumers, mostly housewives charged with home economics, to boycott the same in reaction to rising prices.
Oddly, of course, this is the day that rationing had commenced on the same items in 1943.
You'd think that I'd remember some of this, but I don't on a personal level.
The Western Allies commenced "round the clock bombing" of the Third Reich.
A few things about this are worth noting.
It was essentially a massive upgrading of another theater, this one the skies over Germany, in which the Soviet Union, which lacked a heavy strategic bomber capacity, and which was not strategically placed to join in it, was absent. The Soviets were of course also absent from the Battle of the Atlantic.
While it can't be expected that they would be in either, the fact that the Western Allies carried on these significant efforts benefited the USSR as well as the Western Allies, something that Soviet and now Russian recollections of the war choose to forget.
Also controversial is the extent to which the raids were actually effective. German production went up during the war, so the question is whether strategic bombing depressed it from being higher, or simply disrupted it in other ways. The latter certainly occurred, but to what extent the former did is an open question.
The 15th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Latvian), came into existence. The unit was made up of Latvian volunteers, and conscripts, who harbored the naive hope that serving the Germans would lead to post-war Latvian independence.
While naive, and inexcusably associated with the SS, this is an example of the "war within a war" nature of the Second World War. The Baltic States, along with Ukraine and Poland, would particularly be associated with various armed efforts against the Soviets, some of which were completely independent of association with the Germans, while some, outside of Poland, were. Many of the partisan type movements, which this obviously was not, carried on fighting for some time after the war.
Of note, Latvian resistance to the Soviet Union remained fairly strong up until 1949 and remained a factor the Soviets had to consider into the early 50s. The last violent acts by Latvian resistance forces occurred in the 1980s and the last Forest Brother, Jānis Pīnups, who had deserted from the Red Army during World War Two when wounded and left for dead, came in from hiding in 1995.
Regarding the Baltic States and the SS, during the war Estonia also contributed volunteers to "foreign legion" SS units, that being the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian) The Latvians would contribute a second one, that being the 19th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (2nd Latvian). Because the units contained conscripts, the US regarded them as not complicate in the criminal nature of the SS after the war.
Kim Barker, a journalist who is best known for her book on Afghanistan, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, is coming out with a podcast on a 1985 unsolved murder in Laramie. Moreover, Barker was apparently a high school student at the time.
And she doesn't like the city of her alma mater at all. Of it, in the promotions for this podcast, she's stated:
"I've always remembered it as a mean town. Uncommonly mean. A place of jagged edges and cold people. Where the wind blew so hard it actually whipped pebbles at you."
Wow.
And there's more:
I don't like crime books, but oddly I do like some crime/mystery podcasts. I'm not sure why the difference, and as I'm a Wyomingite and a former resident of Laramie, I'll listen to the podcast.
But frankly, I’m already jaded, and it's due to statements like this:
It was an emblem of her time in Laramie, a town that stood out as the meanest place she’d ever lived in.
Really, you've been to Afghanistan, and Laramie is the meanest place you've lived in?
Hmmm. . . . This is, shall we say, uncommonly crappy. And frankly, this discredits this writer.
I've lived in Laramie twice.
All together, I guess, I've lived in Casper, Laramie, and Lawton (Ft. Sill) Oklahoma. I've been to nearly every town and city in Wyoming, and I've ranged as far as Port Arthur, Texas to Central Alaska, Seoul, South Korea to Montreal.
The author may recall it that way, but if she does, it says more about her life at the time than Laramie.
And indeed, I suspect that's it.
If you listen to the trailer, you hear a string. . . dare I say it, of teenage girl complaints, preserved for decades, probably because she exited the state soon after high school, like so many Wyomingites do. I can't verify that, as her biography is hard to find. Her biography on her website starts with her being a reporter, as if she was born into the South East Asian news bureau she first worked for. A little digging brings up a source from Central Asia, which her reporting is associated with, and it notes that its very difficult to find information on her. It does say, however, that she grew up in Billings, Montana and grew up with her father. Nothing seems to be known about her mother. She's a graduate of Norwestern University, which supports that she probably graduated from high school in Laramie and then took off, never to look back. How long did she live there is an open question, and what brought her father there is another. Having said all of that, teenage girls being relocated isn't something they're generally keen on, and Billings is a bigger city than Laramie. I have yet to meet anyone who didn't like Billings.
Now, I didn't go to high school in Laramie, but I was in Laramie at the time that Barker was, and these events occurred. 1985 is apparently the critical date, and I was at UW at the time. I very vaguely recall this event occurring, and didn't at first. I vaguely recall one of the things about Laramie that Barker mentions in her introduction, which was the male athlete branding. What I recall is that there was a local scandal regarding that, and it certainly wasn't approved by anyone.
A lot of her miscellaneous complaints, however, are really petty and any high school anywhere in the United States, save perhaps for private ones, might be able to have similar stories said about it. Boys being sent out to fight if they engaged in fighting within the school wasn't that uncommon in the 80s. I don't recall it happening at my high school, outside of the C Club Fights, but I do recall it from junior high, in the 1970s, and experienced it myself. I don't regard it as an act of barbarism, although I woudln't approve of it. As noted, I recall this branding story, which was a scandal and not approved of, but today an equally appalling thing goes on all over the United States with the tattooing of children for various reasons, including minors, in spite of its illegality. Certainly college sports teams feature this frequently, and I'd wager many high school athletes experience a similar example of tribalism.
What's really upsetting, however, is the assertion that Laramie was, and is, "mean".
When I went to Laramie in 1983 for the first time, I didn't look forward to it. I found the town alien at first and strange. I probably would have found any place I went to under those circumstances to be like that. I was from Central Wyoming and had lived there my entire life, save for a short stint at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. But by the time I graduated in 1986, I had acclimated to it and there were parts of living in Albany County I really liked. I was back down there a year later, this time not dreading it, and as a graduate student I was pretty comfortable in the town.
I also wasn't a teenager being dislocated from the place I grew up in.
In my last couple of years of undergraduate studies, and in all of my graduate years, I was pretty comfortable with the city. I knew the places and things there, and had friends there. In the summers, and I spent a couple there, it was a really nice place in particular to live.
And let's be honest. Just as the land of high school angst might seem awful, the land you are in when you are young usually isn't.
If I had any complaints, at that time, it was about housing and prices. Housing was always a crisis for a student, and a lot of the places I lived were not very nice. Some were pretty bad. And prices locally were really high, it seemed to us. Local merchants complained about students shopping in Ft. Collins, but we did that as it was cheaper than shopping in Laramie.
The weather in Laramie is another thing. It's 7,000 feet high, in the Rockies, and therefore it can be cold and snowy. The highway closes a lot. In the early 1980s, it was really cold and snowy, with temperatures down below 0 quite regular. Interestingly, by the late 1980s this was less the case. And it does have wind, but ten everyplace from El Paso to the Arctic Circle is pretty windy. Wyoming weather can be a trial for some people, particularly those who are not from here.
Which gets, I guess, to this. A Colorado colleague notes that you have to be tougher just to live in the state. You do. Being from here makes you that way. As the line in the film Wind River puts it, in an exchange between the characters:
Jane Banner: Shouldn't we wait for back up?
Ben: This isn't the land of waiting for back up. This is the land of you're on your own.
And that can be true. If you aren't at least somewhat self-reliant, this may not be the place for you.
The further you get away from Laramie, the more this can be true. Laramie is the most "liberal" city in regular Wyoming, surpassed in that regard only by Jackson. Albany County nearly always sends at least one Democrat to the legislature. If there's left wing social legislation pending, there's a good chance it comes out of Albany County. Albany County is the only county in the state, outside of Teton, where all the things that drive the social right nuts are openly exhibited, due to the University of Wyoming. In real terms, about 1/3d of the city's population are students at any one time, and a lot of those who are not students are employed by the University of Wyoming.
When I graduated from law school, I noted that a lot of students who passed through the College of Law stayed there if they could. That says something about the town. Several good friends of mine over the years who are lawyers stayed there, including ones that had come there from other Wyoming locations. Even a few of my non law school friends worked and lived there for a time, although none of them do any longer.
And in the years since I lived there the influence of Ft. Collins has come in, with downtown establishments mimicking those that are fifty miles to the south. I've known people who retired and left the town, but I also have known people who retired to it.
It's not mean.
But the whole world is mean to some teenagers, with their limited experience and exaggerated sensibilities. Some people keep that perception for the rest of their lives.
Nguyễn Chí Thanh. By Sử dụng hợp lí - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=118355303
Nguyễn Chí Thanh is the man who caused me to go to law school.
Eh?
Now, Nguyễn Chí Thanh was a General in the North Vietnamese Vietnam People's Army and former North Vietnamese politician who died in 1967, when I was just four years old. How could this be?
Well, he was the figure who thought of what became the Tet Offensive of 1968.
From a Vietnamese middle class family, Thanh's father died when he was 14 which forced Thanh into farming, as his family entered poverty. Perhaps it was this experience which lead him in 1937 to join the Vietnamese Communist Party, which in turn lead to being sentenced to French labor camps. He was both a political and military figure, and following 1960, was principally a military one. It was his idea to launch what became the Tet Offensive of 1968, a disastrous, in military terms, general uprising that cost the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese over 100,000 casualties, over twice as much as the Southern effort lost, and which ended so badly that Gen. Võ Nguyên, who accented to the plan and help prepare it, thought that he was going to be arrested and potentially suffer the fate of all who get blamed for stuff in Communist societies do.
Thanh didn't get the blame, for the military failure. Nor did he get the credit for the massive political success, as the offensive shocked the American public and lead to the US abandoning South Vietnam to its fate. He was killed from wounds sustained by a B-52 raid in 1967.
What's that have to do with law school?
Well, this.
In 1980, I had to write a paper in my community college freshman composition class. I was still in high school, but I only went half days and took freshman comp at the college in the afternoon. I wrote a detailed paper on the Tet Offensive of 1968, taking the position that the U.S. had won the battle militarily, but lost the war due to it due to the huge public reaction.
That thesis is widely held now, but at the time, not so much.
Sometime in the next couple of years, I had an American history class of some sort. I can't recall, but I do recall it was well attended. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the professor was a lawyer, but one who had largely not practiced, if he ever had, after doing a stint in the U.S. Navy. I had to write a paper, and what I did, which was legitimate, was to revise and dust off my preexisting one.
Keep in mind, this was in the typewriter days, so that was more difficult than it might sound. Indeed, writing in general was more laborious in those days.
Anyhow, when it came back, I had received an A, and the professor had marked "You should consider an analytical career".
The part of the story I usually don't tell is that I asked my father, "what's an analytical career"? That's probably as I don't want to have my father tagged with any other problematic career stories other than the one that's been mentioned before, which is unintentionally dissuading me from becoming a game warden. Anyhow, he mentioned lawyer. I think that's the only analytical career he mentioned. It's probably the only one that occurred to him, and frankly, it is hard to think of analytical careers.
Reich claims that Joe Biden has restored the economic paradigm that governed from 1932 until the Reagan Administration. He's certainly correct that that Democratic Capitalism, or Market Democracy as it is sometimes called, governed American economic thinking in that period, and he's also correct that Reagan attacked it upon coming into office.
And he's also correct that Milton Friedman, when he was head of the Fed, aggressively attacked inflation. Indeed, Friedman was absolutely correct to have done so, and I wouldn't hold that Reagan's economic policies were wrong at the time.
Of note, some will site to St. Pope John Paul II the Great's encyclical Centesiumus Annus, issued in 1991, as support for a sort of Democratic Capitalism.
Reich's argument, while I'm not wholly convinced by any means, is an interesting one. In essence he argues that the economic system of 1932 to 1980 was the correct one, and the one we went to since that time is unjust.
Lex Anteinternet: A normal winter.: A normal winter. That's exactly what we're having. The weather here has been normal. And in Central Wyoming, that means multiple be..
After I posted the item above, it occurred to me that part of the complaining people do about winter is because they've so been able to defeat natural conditions in their daily lives and then, although only rarely, nature comes along and reminds you it's dominant for the most part. So far, our means of defeating it only do so in fairly average conditions.
Now, these are fairly average conditions, but people aren't used to them. And there are some things you can't get around. Six foot drifts on the Interstate highway, for example, are one such thing.
Anyhow, this caused me to recall that there was a time when people just basically endured these things. It's always easy to say that, but it's true.
Thinking back to when I was a teenager in high school, and fewer people lived on the mountain, it was the case that the county used to annually simply inform people that the mountain road was not its first priority. So if you lived up there, they'd get around to the road after they'd cleared every other country road. It was last. If you didn't like it, don't live there, was the message. People still complained, but not as much, and they didn't receive much sympathy either.
Ranchers, much like now, really didn't expect to get plowed out at all. During the famous Blizzard of 1949 there were instances in which aircraft were ultimately flown over some ranches to see if the occupants of them were in trouble. They didn't have phones or their lines were down. Having known some of the ranchers who experienced that when I was young, their reaction was surprise. They didn't expect anyone to send out an airplane, and they didn't figure they'd be regarded as imperiled for the most part. There were excepts that year, I should note, which resulted in the Wyoming Air National Guard dropping hay for cattle.
This blog started off with the pre World War One era. What about these environs, then?
Cars already existed, and the predominant car of the era, the Model T, would actually have been a fairly good car for the conditions. It has high clearance, thin wheels, low gearing, and it was fairly heavy for its size. Therefore, it was a good car, to some degree, for snow.
It wasn't a four-wheel drive, of course, and the snow we've been getting has been phenomenal.
Snow removal wasn't a thing anywhere before Milwaukee started doing it in 1862. For the most part, most municipalities didn't do it, however, until the automobile era. Quite a bit of plowing originally was done with draft horses, and this continued on until after World War Two to some extent. When streets started to be plowed I don't know, and it's a little difficult to tell, without going through piles of old newspapers to find out. The oldest example I could find was a municipal truck plowing snow in Washington, D.C. in 1916, which is frankly earlier than I would have guessed.
You don't have to have paved roads to have roads that are plowed, but it helps. In 1916, Washington had paved streets. Photographs of Casper show it having maintained dirt roads in the early 1920s. I'm sure that by the 1930s, they were mostly paved. What I don't know is when the city started plowing the snow. A photograph that's online from the Wyoming State Archives shows the Wyoming Highway Department's first snow plow, when it was purchased, which has a date of 1923, just one hundred years ago coincidentally enough. It's probably safe to assume the State didn't plow any highways prior to that. Another photo from the same source shows the local high school's snowplow, which is mounted to a tractor, and has a date of 1930. All in all, plowing the streets and highways must have come on during the 20s and 30s.
Older newspapers also show that in the 20s, the State simply closed more highways than it does now. Some highways are still closed for winter, but at least in the early 1920s the State simply closed, for example, the highway between Shoshone and Thermopolis. Of course, you could, at that time, still make that trip by train.
That brings up this, which we've addressed before. Prior to World War Two, 4x4 vehicles were a real rarity and tended to be confined to industrial operations or logging. Ranchers didn't have 4x4 vehicles, and regular people certainly did not. For that matter, early 4x4s were a real slow moving off-road affair, and they wouldn't have been very useful for most people. It was the U.S. Army that really started the development of the road capable all wheel drive vehicle and it took World War Two to really make them common. Even after the war, it took a long while before very many town residents owned a 4x4.
This meant that once winter came, winter travel in and out of towns became much more limited. Sure, in the 20s, when the weather improved, you could venture out, and people no doubt did. But busting drifts and the like became a post-war thing, and wouldn't have really become common until the 1960s for town residents. Ranchers, for that matter, kept more employees at the time and some of them were stationed in the remoter areas of larger ranches so that they could take care of necessary chores during the winter. In some instances, that meant that cowhands were stationed in remote cabins all winter long, and were checked on rarely, if at all. And they spent the winter there without television or the internet, or for that matter, electricity.
Of course, the other thing this meant is that people whose livelihoods were in town, lived in town. People didn't live on small acreages outside of town, for the most part, if they had jobs in town. If you needed to be in the office, you needed to be within a reasonable distance, which often meant walking distance, of the office. For that matter, people with industrial employment tended to live near it.
The point of all of this, other than things were different then? Well, they were different then.
They were different, for that matter into the 1980s.
And maybe folks need to have a little patience now.
It was the last of the Apollo missions and accordingly the last manned mission to the Moon.
This seems like something I should recall, but I don't. I would have been in 4th Grade at the time, and moon missions were a big deal, but as noted, this was the last one and the 17th Apollo Mission. Fifty years later, I can't recall having paid too much attention to this one, although it seems to me I dimly recall it.
On the same day, the last conscription induction call in U.S. history occurred. The call was to have been one of two to occur in 1972, but the second one was suspended due to a national day of mourning called by President Nixon in honor of Harry S. Truman, who died on December 26, 1972. The conscription call would have occurred on December 28.
The men who were chosen in the draft lottery on this day did not, I believe, immediately but in 1973. This was, after all, in December. Having said that, I'm not completely certain. 49,514 men were inducted into the service via conscription in 1972. 646 were inducted in 1973, with the final induction occurring on June 30, 1973, The height of the Vietnam War era induction occurred in 1966, when 382,010 men were inducted.
On January 27, 1973, President Nixon suspended conscription. In part this recognized the impending end of the Vietnam War, but the move was also clearly political and designed to address increasing civil unrest in spite of the obvious coming end of the war. Conscription had been resumed in 1948 and the Cold War was far from over, but moral in the U.S. military was disintegrating to the crisis level, which provided another, albeit unstated, reason for suspending the draft. The Army started rebuilding itself as an all volunteer force in 1973, but it would really take until the Reagan Administration for a new, effective Army to form.
Congressional authority to induct expired on June 30, 1973, although oddly lottery drawing continued until March 12, 1975. Registration for conscription terminated on April 1, 1975, which I can recall occurring. Registration would resume, however, a mere five years later, in 1980, and it remains a legal obligation for men.
Men drafted on this day would have found themselves in the odd situation of having to serve in the U.S. Army until late 1974, according to The New York Times, which ran a headline on November 23, 1974, that the last conscripts had been discharged. If that is correct, they must have been let go slightly ahead of schedule, which likely would have reflected the end of the Vietnam War and a drawdown that sought to eliminate men who didn't want to be there. Otherwise, the June 30, 1973, inductee should have served until June 1975. The last pool applied only to men born in 1952 or later, so it applied only to men in their early 20s, for practical purposes.
The end of the draft really returned the U.S. military to its historical norm. The Army had not conscripted at all until the Civil War, and then did not do it again until World War One. Militia service, of course, was mandatory in the US up until around the Civil War, when it started to slowly die off as a observed state requirement. The World War One and World War Two drafts had been enormous, with the US drafting 2,294,084 in 1918 alone, and 3,323,970 in 1943. Following 1940, there'd only been one year, 1947, in which there had been no inductions, up until 1974.
The last man inducted was Dwight Elliot Stone. He was a married plumbers apprentice living in Sacramento who was 24 years old at the time and had two kids. He tried to avoid to hide induction before finally turning himself in. He served in the Army for 17 months (which would make the NYT article at least a bit inaccurate) before being discharged early for reasons he wasn't aware of, but which were probably due to the fact that by 1975 the Army didn't really want unwilling soldiers around.
Stone went to basic training at Ft. Polk, at which the press followed him around a bit. He was trained as an electronic technician, after which he was stationed at Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey. Upon his discharged he was quoted as saying "I wouldn't have joined. It wasn't the place to be. I wouldn't recommend it for anyone. I didn't like it. It was poorly run.''
In the early 70s, it was in fact poorly run.
Stone went back to work as a plumber/pipe fitter in Sacramento, but over time his view changed, as it did for many who had been conscripted in the same period. He later stated that while he didn't like being in the Army, he'd had a lot of fun while in it, and he used his service benefits to attend two years of college. His oldest son enlisted in the Marine Corps.
The Uqair Protocol was signed on this day in 1922, setting the boundaries between Iraq, the Sultanate of Nejd, and the Sheikdom of Kuwait.
Basically, the British High Commissioner to Iraq imposed it as a response to Bedouin raiders from Nejd loyal to Ibn Saud being a problem.
Kuwait lost 2/3s of its territory in the deal, setting is modern boundaries. It had no say in the arrangement, resulting in anti-British feelings in Kuwait. It did establish a Saudi Kuwait neutral zone of 2,230 square miles which existed until 1970 and a Saudi Iraqi neutral zone that existed until 1982.
Country Gentleman had a winter theme, but the Saturday Evening Post and Judge were already in the Christmas spirit, even though this was still the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in 1922.
As noted in that thread, it's common now for people to tell you "thank you for your service!" Indeed, some years ago I saw a National Guardsman coming out of the barber shop and, out on the street, a woman being arrested for something yelled it out, to his surprise.
I'm a contraran anyhow, and I always feel awkward about such thanks, but this thread is on thanks.
But in another direction. I'm thankful that I served in the National Guard.
Technically, I served in the Army and the National Guard. Basic training and AIT were so long for cannoneers that I received an Honorable Discharge from the U.S. Army after AIT. And FWIW I was activated for summer employment and other active service at the armory that I have more time in active service than some guys who did the short two-year Cold War enlistments do.
I've often regretted getting out. The end of my Guard career was due to a misconception about how busy I'd be in law school. I listed to people about law school and how hard it was. I shouldn't have.
Anyhow, I'm glad I served in the Guard.
The National Guard/Army put me together with a lot of men, and we're talking about the basically nearly all military of that era, who came from very different backgrounds than me and who worked in lots of different occupations, many of them in manual occupations. I learned from that a lot of them had very common interests with me. I also learned that a lot of them were every bit as smart as I was.
This is something I've found that a lot of people who haven't ever been in the service don't appreciate. Blue collar workers aren't there due to intellectual deficit. And the knowledge they possess in their fields is both vast, and interesting. Knowing that has served me all my life.
Getting through basic training taught me that I was pretty tough. I don't know what basic is like now, but the Army basic training at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, of the 1980s was very close to what was depicted in Full Metal Jacket. We were told by one of our drill sergeants early on that his job was to make basic training as rough as possible, as combat would be worse, and he wanted those who were going to fail, to fail then. Quite a few did fail.
That's served me ever since as well. Indeed, not so much now, but for years decades after Ft. Sill, in times of high stress, things I learned there by memory would come flooding bad to mind. We'd been so well-trained that it was automatic.
It also made every one "man up", although by that age I was pretty much an adult already. Since getting out of school, I've been amazed by the degree to which a lot of modern adults never actually become adults. There's a song out there somewhere called High School Never Ends, and for an amazing number of people, it really doesn't. Being part of an organization in which you are flatly informed that in the event of certain circumstances you are expected to perform until dead, and that death would come soon and violently, really takes the game playing out of a person in serious settings.
Related to that, I've noted it before, and will again, but the Guard also taught me a system of organization and its stayed with me ever since. Everything I've learned about office management I learned in the Guard, including that there's different roles and classes in offices, just like in the Army, for a reason. I've watched over the years as people who don't have that background run around talking about "teams" and "we're all in this together" only to see things fail. I've seen people make friends in offices they shouldn't have, surrender their efficiency to inattention or whatever, and go into power pouts when things didn't go the way they personally felt they should, or just because they turned out to be serious. I've avoided all of that, in no small part due to the Guard/Army.
And the Guard gave me a job when I was young, and really needed one. It helped pay for my schooling and gave me a way to try to do that, for which I remain grateful.
The Guard also blessed me with at least one instance of nearly being killed and not be. That may sound odd, but only people whom have been exposed to sudden violent death, and then escaped it, knows what that means. People's plans are always subject to the fickle hand of fate. One moment you are doing your job, and the next an entire battery of 8in artillery shells are coming right down on you.
And finally, it gave me an appreciation of history in a way which only somebody who has been in a military unit can.
A giant brawl, characterized by the Navy as a race riot, broke out on the USS Kitty Hawk. The event had to be subdued by the Marines.
Kitty Hawk in 1975.
The incident, which happened off of the Vietnamese coast, was emblematic of the increasing disintegration of the late Vietnam War military, something forgotten in the "thank you for your service" era we live in today. Some elements of the U.S. Army were effectively combat ineffective by this time due to moral reasons, and the chaos had spread to the Navy. As part of the overall picture in the military in general, racial tension has become high in an era which saw the first large scale incorporation of black servicemen service wide, even though integration of the services had commenced in 1948. The generally poorer education of African Americans contributed to that, as they were assigned to less desirable military duties.
The Navy had traditionally been almost all white up until this time, save for certain positions like mess stewards that had been assigned to racial minorities. While this very much changed during the Vietnam War, the Kitty Hawk itself only had a 7% African American population. It was nonetheless tense as the volunteer African American sailors sought to break color boundaries. Added to this, the Navy had dropped recruiting standards during the very late Vietnam War as the risk of being drafted decreased and the military fell into disdain. Part of this saw an effort to recruit sailors for career training purposes, but this had the accidental impact of recruiting those who had been educationally disadvantaged. This dropped the overall effectiveness of the Navy's junior enlisted ranks.
The Kitty Hawk had been experiencing rising racial tensions for weeks. On this day, black Airman Apprentice Terry Avinger went to the mess deck and requested two sandwiches, which a white mess cook refused to give him. Avinger reached across the food line and took a second one, which resulted in a shouting match which rapidly escalated. Avinger reported the situation to his bunkmates and urged reprisals which resulted in an African American violent reaction. Ultimately, the Marines intervened and restored a sense of calm, but the matter was not defused until African American/Native American XO Ben Cloud intervened and talked the rioters down. Prior to this, the Marine Corps detachment, which was commanded by a black officer, was prepared to simply storm the quarters occupied by the rioters. This ended Cloud's carrier, perhaps in part as he thought it prudent to give the Black Power Salute to the rioting party to show his unity with their complaints. With that, the ship returned to war duty.
Six weeks later, twenty-seven black sailors were arrested and charged with due to the incident, twenty-one of whom requested trials. No white sailors were arrested. Cloud testified in the trial that the Marines had acted to enforce orders to break up parties of three or more sailors only on black sailors.
Four sailors were convicted of rioting. Fourteen were convicted of assault. Four were found not guilty of all charges. Five sailors had the charges against them dropped.
Cloud.
Cloud, whose intervention had defused the situation, had effectively sacrificed his career under the odd informal rules that existed in the Navy. He was not in command of the vessel, and by some accounts the situation that gave rise to the incident was due in part to the ineffectiveness on the situation giving rise to it exhibited by the actual commander of the vessel, although it has been noted that he coordinated with Cloud's suggested approach, which he was reluctant to try at first. Had Cloud not intervened, chances are high that the Marines would have killed some of the sailors involved, which likely would have ended the career of the vessel's commander. Cloud went on to a career as a commercial aviator.
Avinger, who had a rough childhood and who was 18 at the time of the incident, had a string of disciplinary infractions prior to this incident and ended up in the brig due to it. Indeed, he'd nearly been separated from the Navy in basic training, and only received his apprentice assignment after writing the vessel's commander requesting a second chance due to a different disciplinary event. He was discharged from the Navy in 1973. He was incarcerated twice between 1973 and 1984, at which time he used his jail time to study for a new career, becoming an alcohol and drug councillor. In that capacity, he ended up working for Amtrak. He later expressed remorse for what had occurred.
It's sometimes noted that the U.S. Navy has never had a mutiny. If that's true, it's at least arguable that it never had one, as it refused to recognize this event as one.
The basic insignia for the rank of First Sergeant at the E-8 grade, shown with the unofficial summer colors of khaki on OD. This color scheme was common for the summertime khaki uniform, but never approved. The proper colors were OD stripes on a black background.
Today in World War II History—September 22, 1942: Germans split Soviet 62nd Army in Stalingrad and occupy the southern half of the city. US Army raises grade of first sergeant to that of master sergeant.
From Sarah Sundin's blog
Clearly, the item about the Battle of Stalingrad is the important item, but I've linked this in here due to the item on U.S. Army ranks. On this day in 1942 the grade of the rank of First Sergeant was made equal to that of Master Sergeant.
We've discussed enlisted Army ranks here before, indeed more than once, I think.
First Sergeant are the senior enlisted NCO's in a company, battery or troop. It's an important rank, and it's been around for an extremely long time. He is, literally, the "first" sergeant and for enlisted soldiers often the most senior soldier they typically engage with, commonly nicknamed "top".
When the Army was reorganized in 1920, 1st Sergeants were given the grade of E-6. That would surprise modern soldiers, as that's the grade now held by Staff Sergeants, who at that time held the grade E-5. E-5 today is held by the rank of Sergeant, but at that time, Sergeants were E-4s, as they still are in the Air Force.
Master Sergeants, that title indicating a senior status to that sometimes indicated for master tradesmen, were E-7s. Today, that grade is held by the rank of Sergeant First Class. That rank didn't exist in 1920.
On this day in 1942 the Army adopted a new enlisted structure, changing some of the enlisted ranks. Technician grades, which we've earlier discussed, were adopted, foreshadowing the later introduction of Specialists. Enlisted ranks remained the same up through Staff Sergeant. First Sergeants were moved from E-6 to E-7, making them the equivalent of Master Sergeants, and an additional rocker was added to their insignia to indicate their equivalency. In the E-6 position the rank of Technical Sergeant, which had already coexisted with First Sergeant, remained.
This basic structure remained until 1948 when technicians were eliminated, but new rank insignia were introduced for non combatant NCO's, only barely distinguishable from those of combatants. Technical Sergeant, at that time, was renamed to Sergeant First Class. Moreover, the rank of "Recruit" was introduced for what had been "buck privates", and introduced at the E-1 level, making there three grades of privates. The rank of Staff Sergeant was eliminated, and buck Sergeants took their insignia.
Specialists were added in 1955.
n 1959 a jump in grades happened in enlisted ranks overall. Staff Sergeants were reintroduced as E-6s, acquiring their prior insignia, and Sergeants became E-5s and reacquired their three chevron and no rocker insignia., Sergeants First Class took the E-7 grade and First Sergeants (and Master Sergeants) E-8s. The rank of "Recruit" was renamed Private E-1. Privates at the E-3 level worse the single chevron, as they had since 1948. This is basically the structure we've had since then, except that PFC's obtain a rocker in 1968, and Private E-2 reclaimed the single stripe insignia that they hadn't had since 1948. The upper Specialists insignia over E-4 have also largely disappeared.
As this recitation also notes, the Technician grades were introduced during the same year as Top got a promotion and pay raise. They'd existed since January.
In a manner that only made sense to the Army, two stripe technicians were introduced at the grade of E-3, but with the title of Technician 5th grade. If that doesn't quite made sense, its because the "E" structure that I've been using here wasn't introduced until 1949. Prior to that, while the E grades noted here offer equivalency, so that it's easy to tell the actual changes over time, pay grades went by a simple number. Pay grade 7 was the lowest, and it was the one that applied to buck privates, or what we'd later refer to, most of the time, to Private E-1s. Pay grade 1 was the highest, which was equivalent to the post 1949 E-7.
That right there helps explain some of this evolution, by the way. There was nothing higher than pay grade 1, in enlisted ranks, and that was equivalent to E-7. Now, the highest enlisted grade normally encountered is E-8, which Master Sergeants and First Sergeants occupy, as of 1959. In that same year, 1959, the rank of Sergeant Major was introduced at E-9, as was Specialist E-9. E-9 remains the highest enlisted grade today, although there are several different types of Sergeant Majors that occupy it, some being exceedingly rare.
Anyhow, back to technicians. Introduced in January, right after the war started, their existence reflected the much more technical Army of 1940 as compared to earlier. The creation of the rank was an attempt to create a rank and pay scheme for men who were not combatants. Something had to be done, but the experiment wasn't really successful, leading to the change to combatant and non-combatant ratings in 1948, and ultimately to the not hugely successful creation of specialists ranks in 1959. On that latter creation, the number of specialist ranks was already being reduced by 1967 and was further cut back in 1978. When I joined the National Guard in 1981, there were still Specialist E-6s, but in 1985 that was changed so that only Specialist E-4 remained. At the same time, however, the increasingly professional nature of the Army after the elimination of the draft meant that the number of men occupying lower enlisted ranks increased, and therefore the Army reduced the number of Corporal E-4s in favor of Specialist E-4s, the distinction being that Corporals are NCOs and Specialists are not.
Louis Mbarick Fall, aka Siki, became the world light heavyweight champion in boxing after champion Georges Carpentier knocked down Siki in the firth round, thereby violating a deal not to injury Siki in exchange for Siki throwing the fight.
Fall was a Senegalese veteran of the French Army from World War One. His boxing career was impressive, and it was suggested at one time that he fight heavyweight champion, Jack Dempsey.
He ultimately lost the title to Irish fighter Mike McTigue in 1925, only to be murdered in New York City the following month. McTigue, oddly enough, would die in poverty and ill health in Queens, New York, in 1966.
Boxing, it might be noted, has few happy endings.
Turkish nationalist seized Ezine, which was in the Allied neutral zone.
The existence of Dorothy Ruth came to light. The one-year-old daughter of Babe Ruth had been sighted with the Babe and his wife Helen. The couple claimed she had been kept from public light, as she had been ill.
In truth, Dorothy's mother was Juanita Jennings, a paramour of Ruth's. The couple adopted Dorothy in an age in which such infidelities were often kept secret and, most likely, that in spite of George Herman Ruth's behavior, their teenage wedding at St. Paul's Catholic Church in Ellicott City had some traction with the couple in spite of Ruth's infidelities. That caught up, however, with Helen in 1925 when the couple separated.. She died in 1929 in a house fire in Waterford Massachusetts, by which time she was living with a Dr. Kinder, DDS, as "Mrs. Kinder".
Ruth would remarry actress and model Clair Hodgson in 1929. She was a widow and the union would last the rest of their lives, with Clair putting lacking structure into Ruth's' personal life.
Dorothy did not know that Juanita, whom she knew as Aunt Nita, was her mother until she was 59. She died in 1989.
The Cable Act was signed into law, allowing American women who married foreign nationals to keep
The Bob Newhart Show premiered on CBS. One of the great sitcoms of the 1970s, it would run only until 1978.
I'm actually fairly surprised, as I well recall the show and would have thought that it premiered a little later than 1972. Having said that it has always, in my memory, seemed very early and mid 1970s, not late 1970s. My family watched it regularly.
The show was set in Chicago at a time just after the television Rural Purge which would feature a lot of television comedies set in mid-sized Midwestern cities. WKRP In Cincinnati, for example, was set, obviously, in Cincinnati. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set in Minneapolis.
Earlier that same week, on September 14, the nostalgic The Waltons commenced airing. While fondly remembered, I never liked it. I really dislike Spencer's Mountain, which is based on the same source material.
We didn't watch The Waltons, but even back then I had the feeling I ought to like it. I never did and never have. It always, even in the 1970s, had the feel of a show filmed in the 1970s, with the look of the 1970s, trying to be about the 1930s. It ran until 1981. Additionally, the set and the fact that it was tapped made it impossible to suspend awareness that you were, in fact, watching it in the 1970s.
The show was unusual in that it had a rural setting at a time in which most television shows did not. It was also unusual in that it presented a very clean, romanticized, look at the Great Depression, something that was well within living memory of many of the viewers. In this fashion, it contrasted with the earlier Spencer's Mountain, which was centered on desperation. Both were based on the work of Earl Hamner Jr. who had grown up in Depression era Virginia. Hamner died in 2016 at the age of 92.
FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt reviewed a draft of Bob Woodward's news story on Watergate by telephone and confirmed an anonymous tip that money from Maurice Stans had been used to finance the break in of the Watergate Hotel. Felt did so undercover, using the odd and somewhat perverted cover name Deep Throat.
First of all, let me note that I’m not accusing Trump of being in the mob.
I just found this interesting, and I unfortunately find it a sad and interesting look at how things were (hopefully not still are) in business, on the East Coast.
Back in December 2019, not all that long ago really, and running up to the election that following year, Rolling Stone published an article written by Seth Hettena entitled:
The Real-Life Mob Families of ‘The Irishman’? Donald Trump
Knew Them
The president and his associates have long histories with
the Mafia figures who populate Scorsese's film
The article was written because The Irishman had just been released on television.1
Rolling Stone noted how the central characters in the film were now all dead, quite of a few of them because of mob hits, which also wasn't what the film was about. It was about two very elderly men who are still living. One of them was Donald Trump. As the article states:
Well, many still remember. One person who knew the real-life mob families that show up in The Irishman is President Donald Trump.
And it goes on:
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Trump’s buildings and his
casinos attracted underworld figures like “Fat Tony” Salerno, the
Fedora-wearing, cigar-chomping boss of the Genovese crime family. Salerno,
who’s portrayed in the film by Domenick Lombardozzi, supplied the fast-drying
concrete that built Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Salerno also
controlled the local concrete workers union, and when a strike shut down
construction in Manhattan in 1982, the one of the few buildings that wasn’t
affected was Trump Tower.
The Irishman is based on the 2003 book I Heard You Paint
Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa, by
Charles Brandt. (The title is a reference to the special kind of painting
Sheeran did that left his victims’ brains on the wall.) The book is full of
characters who didn’t make it into the movie, but they did surface in Trump’s
world. One is Philadelphia mob boss Philip Testa, the “chicken man” whose 1981
murder by nail bomb Bruce Springsteen sings about in the song “Atlantic City.”
Testa’s son sold Trump premium land that became a casino parking lot. Another
figure in the book is Testa’s successor, Nicodemus “Little Nicky” Scarfo, whose
associates tried to lease Trump land for his casino in Atlantic City — until
New Jersey casino regulators quashed the deal.
And it goes on:
In 1983, the year Trump Tower opened its doors, the future president reportedly met the Genovese family boss. The common thread linking Salerno and Trump was Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer who represented both men. Cohn, the heavy-lidded henchman to Senator Joseph McCarthy, introduced the two men in his Manhattan townhouse, according to the late journalist Wayne Barrett. Under oath, Trump swore that wasn’t true, but he also swore that he didn’t know that Cohn represented Salerno, a fact that had been widely reported in Cohn’s obituary a few years earlier.
And it’s not just Trump who has links to the world depicted in The Irishman. It also overlapped with some of the figures in Trump’s world, past and present. Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political adviser, also met Salerno when he visited Cohn’s Manhattan brownstone. This was in 1979, and Stone had been tapped to run Ronald Reagan’s political operation in New York. Cohn, dressed in a silk bathrobe, introduced Stone to the mobster and then offered to help him with the Reagan campaign. Cohn’s advice would change the course of Stone’s life: “What you need is Donald Trump.” Cohn sent the young political operative off to meet the up-and-coming real estate developer. It was a path that would lead 40 years later to Stone’s conviction last month on charges of lying to Congress about his contacts with WikiLeaks.
Ooo. . . ick.
And there's more:
In March 1986, Giuliani announced that a grand jury had indicted Salerno and others on charges that included rigging construction bids. Trump Plaza, a co-op apartment building on Manhattan’s East Side, was specifically mentioned in the 29-count indictment. Salerno arranged things so his concrete company got a $7.8 million contract at Trump Plaza. It just so happens that while these bids were being rigged, the building was under construction, right around the time that Trump met Salerno in Cohn’s townhouse. Even so, the indictment makes it clear that the bid-rigging occurred without the knowledge of developers.
The FBI had uncovered the concrete bid-rigging scheme at Trump Plaza by secretly bugging Mafia homes and hangouts, including the Palma Boys Social Club, where DeNiro and his “rabbi” Russell Bufalino, played by Joe Pesci, sit down with Salerno in Scorsese’s film. Giuliani, by his own account, listened to countless hours of secretly recorded conversations of mobsters, and he reportedly was able to pull off a convincing impression of the mobster’s scratchy voice. “When you listen to those guys for thousands of hours, you can’t help but sound like them,” Giuliani once said.
Well that explains a lot.
But it wasn't limited to Trump, another was. . . Joe Biden.
Trump wasn’t the only one who knew the people in the world
of The Irishman. In addition to being a hit man, Sheeran was president of a
local Teamsters union in Delaware. In 1972, shortly before Election Day, a
prominent lawyer who was very big in the Democratic Party came to see him.
There were some political ads that would run in the local newspaper every day
in the last week before election, and the lawyer didn’t want them to run. So
Sheeran set up a picket line outside the newspaper, and he knew the Teamsters
union drivers who delivered the paper wouldn’t cross it. So the ads were never
delivered, and on Election Day, Delaware had a new senator: a young man named
Joe Biden. After that, Sheeran said Biden’s door was always open. “You could
reach out for him, and he would listen,” he wrote.
The Biden story isn’t in the movie. There wasn’t room enough
for everyone to make it into Scorsese’s epic Mafia biopic, but Salerno does —
and with good reason. Salerno ran the most powerful of New York’s five Mafia
families. “I’m the fucking boss, that’s who I am,” Salerno once boasted in a
secretly recorded conversation. “Connecticut is mine; New Jersey is mine.”
Nothing got built in New York without Salerno dipping his meaty hand into the
till.
I think that last line is correct. The Mafia was thick into unions, and it controlled a lot. Unfortunately, that means that it dealt with conventional businessmen and politicians a lot as well. This is foreign to a lot of the country, however, and it really never develops in the news, beyond the rumor stage, and it isn't likely to now.
Footnotes:
1. To my surprise, I haven't done a review of the excellent film yet. I'll have to do one. It is well worth watching.
2. According to an article in Politico by David Cay Johnston:
There was something a little peculiar about the construction
of Trump Tower, and subsequent Trump projects in New York. Most skyscrapers are
steel girder construction, and that was especially true in the 1980s, says John
Cross of the American Iron & Steel Institute. Some use pre-cast concrete.
Trump chose a costlier and in many ways riskier method: ready-mix concrete.
Ready-mix has some advantages: it can speed up construction, and doesn’t
require costly fireproofing. But it must be poured quickly or it will harden in
the delivery truck drums, ruining them as well as creating costly problems with
the building itself. That leaves developers vulnerable to the unions: the
worksite gate is union controlled, so even a brief labor slowdown can turn into
an expensive disaster.
Salerno, Castellano and other organized crime figures
controlled the ready-mix business in New York, and everyone in construction at
the time knew it. So did government investigators trying to break up the mob,
urged on by major developers such as the LeFrak and Resnick families. Trump
ended up not only using ready-mix concrete, but also paying what a federal
indictment of Salerno later concluded were inflated prices for it – repeatedly
– to S & A Concrete, a firm Salerno and Castellano owned through fronts,
and possibly to other mob-controlled firms. As Barrett noted, by choosing to
build with ready-mix concrete rather than other materials, Trump put himself
“at the mercy of a legion of concrete racketeers.”
Salerno and Castellano and other mob families controlled
both the concrete business and the unions involved in delivering and pouring
it. The risks this created became clear from testimony later by Irving Fischer,
the general contractor who built Trump Tower. Fischer said concrete union
“goons” once stormed his offices, holding a knife to throat of his switchboard
operator to drive home the seriousness of their demands, which included no-show
jobs during construction of Trump Tower.
But with Cohn as his lawyer, Trump apparently had no reason
to personally fear Salerno or Castellano—at least, not once he agreed to
pay inflated concrete prices. What Trump appeared to receive in return was
union peace. That meant the project would never face costly construction or
delivery delays.
Kleo is a new, just released, German Netflix series. I literally stumbled on it, as I haven't watched Netflix for a while, but I was temporarily idled due to medical fun and games and there was literally nothing worth watching on regular television. I started watching it as it the summation of it on Netflix suggested it'd be the sort of movie I might like. I like spy films and mysteries, and I'm not wholly adverse to shoot 'em ups, even when, or perhaps particularly when, they're superficial.
Well, it exceeded my expectation.
Set in the 1980s, the eight part series is frankly very difficult to describe. It follows the story of East German female Stasi (East German state police) assassin Kleo Straub as she goes from being an "unofficial agent" of the Stasi whose job is killing targets they designate, to being set up and imprisoned, to being released in 1989 as East Germany begins to collapse, at which time she's dedicated to finding those who wrongly accused her and killing them.
And that's all just in the first episode.
Added to that, we have a failed West German policeman who was present in The Big Eden, a nightclub, the night that Kleo performs her last killing for the DDR, who can never get quite over it and who, upon Kleo's release, realizes that she's the woman he identified as the killer the night of the murder.
All of that doesn't do it justice, however.
The film features far more twists and turns than most spy movies, and makes the tricky loyalties in the John Wick films look like child's play. Kleo, the assassin herself, played by Jella Haase, is impossible not to like, even though she's clearly partially unhinged and trying to get through life with a badly damaged soul. Sven Petzold, the detective, is dogged in his pursuit, but he's also hapless and somewhat incompetent in his job. Indeed, as an example, it's obvious about halfway through the film that Sven at first deeply likes Kleo and then is falling in love with her even though she's so messed up that he has to at one point make her promise to quit killing people, which she does simply because he requests it, not because she has any real concept of right and wrong beyond being a dedicated Communist.
None of this, however, comes close to actually describing the plot.
In terms of its history, which is why we review certain films here, this film does a good job of capturing the atmosphere of the times in Germany and Europe. The East Germans, whom in this film are mostly those associated with the Communist government, can hardly gasp what is happening to them as their government collapses. As many of them are its agents, they're dedicated to an institution that's collapsing for the most part, while some of them are rapidly moving on into capitalism. The West Germans are pretty willing to take advantage of the situation. More than that, however, West Germany is shown to have become a multicultural post Volk society, whereas East Germany has not, something even demonstrated by the actors chosen in the film. All of the East German characters are figures that we'd recognize from classic films involving the Germans of World War Two, even though that is not what they are portraying. They're all very German (although some of the actors actually are not). The West Germans, however, appear not only more modern and 1980s "cool", but many of them are clearly not ethnically German, that most obviously being the case for West German intelligence agent Min Sun, who is played by Chinese-born, but German raised, Yun Huang.
Backgrounds are correct for the period, including the funky German techno music that plays a role in the series. Clothing is as well, with that also providing a difference between the East and the West. Firearm wise the maker was careful to equip the East Germans with Soviet type handguns, whereas the West Germans carry the iconic German PPK.
The film includes reference to actual characters from the period, and not just in the greater sense of being background for the times. The head of the East German police is a character in the film and not fictionalized as to name, for instance. Margot Honecker, Erich Honecker's third wife, shows up as a character. These insertions are done so well, that offhand references to fictional events become difficult to distinguish from ones that didn't happen, as in references to the "woman who attempted to kill Reagan" and the details of that event, which never occurred.
This being a German movie, it should be noted that there is seemingly an obligation that Haase be seen topless at some point. In this case, the nudity is basically limited to a single scene, but it's quite graphic. There must be a clause in the contracts for German actresses that they have to appear nude at some point in a film.
Anyhow, It's very well done and with watching.
As a note, this is a German language movie, but it has well done English subtitles. An option to listen to it with British English dubbing is available, but I don't care for that much personally. The subtitles are very close translations of the German, with departures due to German idioms that don't granslate perfectly.
The big news in Casper was that the Texas Company, generally referred to as Texaco, was coming to Casper. It would build a refinery on the edge of what became Evansville, referred to in these articles as the lands belonging to the Evans Holding Company.
The refinery was one of three in operation here when I was young, including the giant Standard Oil Refinery and the Sinclair Refinery, the latter of which had been built originally by Husky Petroleum. Only the Sinclair Refinery remains in operation. The Texaco refinery closed in 1982. The Standard Oil Refinery closed for good in 1991.
The Checker Cab Manufacturing Company was created on this day Morris Markin, a Russian immigrant, who assembled the company form the failed ruins of several others. He was only 28 years old.
An incredible figure, he had a gift for business that had demonstrated itself both in Imperial Russia and the United States, with the Russian Jewish immigrant succeeding at nearly everything he touched in spite of the long odds involved.
Checker's were the default American cab for decades, in their final years taking on a 1950s appearance that would last until the last one was produced in 1982.
Checker cab from Wikipedia commons.
The College of Cardinals gathered in Rome to begin the selection process for a new Bishop of Rome and head of the Catholic Church.
This is, I'd note, also the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses, timed for his 40th birthday.
You probably haven't read it.
And if you tried, you probably gave up.
And that's probably because it's crap.
Those are harsh words for a book that's widely heralded, but often people forget why a book makes a splash in the first place. I suspect that's the case for this book. A common reaction of people who try to read it is to find that it's "hard going" and they put it down.
This is, I'd note, the same thing that people say about Mein Kampf, which I haven't read, and I'm not going to. I note that as these two tomes are roughly contemporaneous and lots of copies have been printed that nobody read. I'm not saying the content is the same. I am saying that they're both probably crap.
As for Ulysses, it's probably gathering more dust than readers, as it's just not that great.
My exposure to Joyce is from one short story of his I read eons ago while in high school, and frankly it wasn't great.
And while I'm at it, Liam O'Flaherty's short story The Sniper, which we had to read, also isn't great. M'eh.
Anyhow, Joyce fits in the same category I'd place Hemingway. He obtained a reputation early on and that made his reputation. People when they read their books secretly, I think, say "hmmm. . . . not great" as whatever made them "great" in the first place applied only to their time and place, if it even applied to the time and place. They're preserved today because of that early reputation and because English departments continue to imagine they're great. But for English departments, they'd be forgotten. This book, and Finnegan's Wake, are basically not read, based on the commentary you see from honest people who attempted to.
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