I went to university in the 1980s. Prior to entering university it was emphasized to me that I'd need to learn a foreign language. I checked it out, and that was in fact quite correct. The courses of study I was looking at, which were scientific in nature, all required foreign languages in order to graduate.
In junior high I took French. The options were French, Latin, or Spanish. French was my choice as my mother spoke French and I had a cultural connection to it. In high school I took German, as my father knew it and I had a cultural connection to it. In university, as a science major, I took German. Two semesters of basic German and one of German literature, in German. I.e., the whole class was taught in German.
It's not too much to ask.
I've never regretted a moment I've dedicated to languages outside of the mother tongue.
My father took German in university and already spoke it and Latin. My mother majored in French, which she already knew how to speak, but she knew Latin as well.
A century ago a university student wouldn't have made it out of university without a command of Latin and Greek.
For that matter, a university student, no matter what they would have taken, would have had a familiarity with the Middle English classics.
These things are not unimportant. Part of the reason we are in the fix we are today is that the occupant of the Oval Office speaks gibberish, like an uneducated moron. Many Americans who are ostensibly well educated cannot get by, even in a rudimentary fashion, in a foreign tongue. In this regard, the average illegal immigrant from south of the border is much better educated linguistically and culturally than the average American.
Exposure to a foreign language, even if you forget it, is illuminating as the culture of the language will come to you to some degree. This presents a strong argument for Latin returning as a requirement for university, as we're all latent residents of the Roman Empire and don't know it, through its culture. Electing a Presiden twho speaks GibberyDoo is good evidence of how far we've fallen. Like the Vandals smashing the mosaics to see if the animals were trapped in the floor, we're smashing the country and the culture as we're equally ignorant.
The Andrew Sisters song Rum and Coca Cola hit the No. 1 position on the Billboard charts. It was a song I recall as my Quebecois mother liked it.
This song was in the nature of cute at the time, but frankly it's about as accidentally imperialist as possible.
When I was 19 years old, which was the drinking age at the time, this was the first mixed drink I ever ordered in a bar, for the reason it was the only one I'd ever heard of. I was out on the town with a group of my high school friends.
In my view, it's awful. I can't stand rum. Frankly, I wish I was like one of my close friends and never developed a taste for alcohol at all. I do like beer.
The SAS launched Operation Cold Comfort in Italy.
German scientists evacuated the Peenemünde Army Research Center.
One of my (Canadian) cousins lives on Peenemünde today. He's a scientist. Much of the Western world outside of the United States is still keen on science, including our recent allies, and or enemies. Now that J.D. Vance has indicated that we intend to crawl in a hole and pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist, science stands a chance again.
Scopes monkey trials anyone? American being second rate hick nation anyone?
Speaking of Canadians, who entered World War Two in 1939 when the US was still pretending that it could live on a seperate planet, Canadian troops reached the Rhine along a ten mile front.
They were all volunteers.
If I seem bitter, well yes I'm bitter that a Baby Boomer who is morally reprehensible and a South African whose sorry ass should be kicked back to Johannesburg are wrecking the nation, well yes I am.
And, if he's so nifty, why isn't that South African (who, I'll note, emigrated to Canada and incidnetally didn't have to serve in the, mostly black, South African Army as a result) making piles of cash, and producing piles of children, there?
" Infantrymen are working with engineers in road repair near Bullingen, Belgium, to keep supplies moving to the front. Rubble from houses supplies ballast fill. 17 February, 1945. Company C, 395th Infantry Regiment, 99th Infantry Division."
US troops, who were not all volunteers, launched attacks from Luxembourg and near Saarbrucken.
"Mines and snipers in Hanweiler, Germany, forces this battalion anti-tank unit to seek another route as they move up to support their regiment which jumped off on a pre-dawn attack. They have just made the initial crossing from Sarrguemines, France, into Hanweiler, and over the Saar River. 17 February, 1945. 3rd Battalion, 253rd Infantry Regiment, 63rd Infantry Division." Men who fought for values now betrayed by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and J.D. Vance. If you doubt it, look a the values of post war voters. It's okay, we'll express those values again, but it'll be blood due to our ignorance, again.
Dutch resistance fighter Gabrielle Widner died in Königsberg/Neumark concentration camp from starvation. Unusually, she was a Seventh Day Adventist.
The Italian battleship Conte di Cavour and the unfinished Impero were sunk in Trieste harbor by the RAF.
The British landed at Ru-Ya sought of Myebon, Burma.
The U.S. Navy's Task Force 58 hit Tokyo and Yokohama. That the Japanese home island are fatally exposed is now evident.
Pre invasion bombardments continued at Iwo Jima. Counter battery fire damaged several US ships, including the USS Tennessee.
That's correct. Just months shy of its 70th Anniversary, SI laid off everyone after failing to pay its licensing fees to the magazine's parent company.
Print magazines are rapidly becoming dinosaurs, as we all know. Many of the greats, such as The New Republic, Time or Newsweek, aren't what they once were. For that matter, many don't print at all. Newsweek, for instance, does not.
Sic transit glori mundi.
My father subscribed to it. It came to the house, along with Time, Newsweek, People, Life and Look (when there was a Look). After we perused them, they went down to his office. I loved Time and Newsweek (People is trash) and I recall pretty vividly observing South Vietnam's fall as I read them, at 12 years old.
I always looked through Sports Illustrated when I was young, although I think the infamous swimsuit issue, which is and was soft pornography, didn't seem to make an appearance at the house, or the office either.
It was, and is, a great magazine, covering every sport imaginable.
Wyoming teams appeared on the cover more than once.
As an adult, I lost interest in the magazine, although remained a great one when I occasionally viewed it. A college friend of mine took up giving me their swimsuit calendar every year for a while when I was a college student, with the great model of that era being Kathy Ireland, who had the Kate Upton role of her era. Interestingly, both Ireland and Upton are devout Christians (Upton has a cross tattoo on her hand), which given their swimsuit issue role is a bit of a surprise, but perhaps no more than the fact that I had those calendars on my walls during those years, and certainly wouldn't now.
As noted, save for its annual descent into cheesecake, it was a great magazine.
At least by some measures, New Years are supposed to be periods of introspection. If so, the annual arrival of New Year’s this year certainly has been for me.
2023, by which I really mean the period from October 2022 to the present, has been the worst year of my life, and that’s saying something.
Probably only people who know me really well would know that I’ve had, at least by western world standards, a rough life to some degree. My teenage years and early (20s) adulthood was overshadowed by the physical and accompanying mental decline of my mother, something that still hangs over me like a dark cloud in a lot of ways. It certainly sprung me from being a child at age 12 to an adult at age 13 virtually overnight, and not in ways that were good really, but in ways you can’t ever get back. My relationship with my mother really didn’t recover in some ways until she was near death, and it never recovered in some ways. I’m still working on that, trying to understand that what happened to her wasn’t her fault, or anyone else’s.
Added to that, the death of my father at age 62 was an irreparable loss to me that I’ve also never recovered from and won’t be able to. As I noted here the other day, being an only child meant that I didn’t have a sibling to help endure this loss with, and when he died the person then closest to me in the world died, leaving me with an obligation to my mother that was a very heavy burden under the circumstances.
In short, things haven’t been always a treat.
But then, are they for anyone?
It may in fact be the case that everyone’s life is rough, to at least varying extents. Maybe its best if you don’t even recognize that fact.
Anyhow, in October, 2022, as I’ve noted here before, I had colon surgery, following a colonoscopy that revealed a polyp too big to be removed in that process. I really waited well beyond the age at which you should have your first colonoscopy, which was inexcusable on my part. Had I gone in earlier (a lesson for everyone who might read this), the surgery would never have been necessary. Ultimately the polyp proved to be precancerous, and was “as close to cancer as it can be without being cancer”.
I was 59 years old when I went in for that and that’s the very first instance of surgery, other than I suppose oral surgery to have a broken molar and the nearby wisdom tooth, taken out. What I didn’t really grasp, but should have even due to the oral surgery, is that I wasn’t going to bounce back right away. I expected to. I didn’t even really expect to be out of work for more than a couple of days, in spite of everything that everyone told me.
Well, I’ve never fully recovered from the surgery and I’m not going to, that’s clear by now. I notice it mostly in the mornings. I just can’t eat. Things make me sick, no matter what they are, as a rule. The onset of late in life lactose intolerance has made that even worse. For decades what I ate for breakfast was cereal with milk. I can’t really eat that anymore.
So be it, but what really surprised me was the onset of really deep fatigue. I was simply worn out from the surgery and it lingered for months. I was tired like I never had been before in my life.
To compound it, when the diagnostic films were done for the colon surgery, a MRI was done all the way up to my neck which revealed I had a sizable polyp on my thyroid. The same surgeon recommended that the thyroid come out and seemed to look at the question as to what to do as almost absurd. I was so surprised, and so beat up from the first surgery, that I went to my regular doctor for a second opinion. He referred me to an endocrinologist. That doctor had no qualms at all about what needed to be done. It needed out, the risk of cancer was so high, I was informed, that it was almost certainly cancer.
Great.
I ended up having a partial thyroidectomy in Denver. I was extremely hesitant about the whole thing.
Well, the polyp turned out to be benign, which overjoyed the medicos but made me feel like I'd done something I could have avoided. After surgery, I hoped to avoid medication (I've never had daily medications), but wasn't lucky there either.
Since the thyroid surgery, and particularly at first, on a lot of days I've just been in a fog and tired all the time. It’s a difficult thing to describe, as it’s a feeling that’s internal. I don’t think anyone else noticed it at all, but plowing through my days, and that’s what it felt like, I just didn't feel right. I complained a lot about it to my wife, but in retrospect now I realize that if you complain a lot about certain topics, it become routine and won’t be paid too much attention to, particularly if there are no external manifestations that are obvious.
There were in fact external manifestations, but they weren’t obvious to anyone but me. Normally, I look forward to the weekends and feel disappointed if I have to work on Saturdays, which I often must do. I was so tired and dragged down, however, that I actually started to look forward to having to be in my office on Saturday. I’d drag myself out, a little, to go fishing and hunting, but my feet felt leaden and I just wasn’t having the fun I normally did, the exception being when my kids were here.
I just went in for a follow-up and upon examination just recently. At that time the doctor asked me how I was doing and I reported what I was feeling and experiencing. He gave me a physical examination. I didn’t have bloodwork yet, as doing this on December 26 meant that I didn’t have the chance to get it done. Based on the physical examination, they determined they needed to up my meds. “Everything will be fine”, I was told.
The bloodwork came back and showed everything to be just what it should be. They immediately cancelled the doubling of the meds.
Long story short, what’s going on is post-surgery depression, a thing I didn't know even existed.
This is, apparently, particularly associated with thyroid surgeries, although most people don’t experience it. To just sort of note what’s out there, here’s a medical journal report on it:
Thyroid surgery is usually recommended for thyroid cancer and can be to remove one lobe of the thyroid (partial thyroidectomy) or to remove the entire thyroid (total thyroidectomy). Thyroidectomy may also be recommended for certain non-cancerous disorders including hyperthyroidism and large goiters. The results of a total thyroidectomy is hypothyroidism which requires lifelong treatment with a thyroid hormone pill. Several recent reports have highlighted a decrease in the quality of life and an increase in depression in some patients with hypothyroidism due to thyroid surgery. Therefore, the authors have examined if there is an association between thyroid surgery and a new onset of depression.
Great.
Apparently post-surgery depression is a thing with older adults anyhow, and I’m 60. But to make it even niftier, depression is even more associated with colon surgery. Another medical journal notes
The prevalence of anxiety, depression and PTSD appears to be high in patients who have undergone colorectal surgery. Younger patients and women are particularly at risk.
I don’t know the cause of all of this, and there could be a bunch of them that occur to me, some of which actually wouldn’t explain it in my case. But being honest with myself, one of the things has to do with a family history and my early life.
Anxiety of a type is a condition which occurs on my mother’s side of my family. Not everyone has it by any means, but some do and at least in one case, my maternal grandfather, it was really noticeable. He was by all accounts an extremely intelligent man, but as a young man he suffered enormously from anxiety which kept him from building a career at an age, in that era in particular, a person normally did, and which in turn kept him from marrying at an age when people normally did. My grandmother was his fiancé forever, and its actually a bit surprising that she waited for him, but then she had her own background haunting her, that being that she was highly educated and intelligent, but her own mother was not particularly fond of her, and was open about it.
Ultimately my grandfather found a career in real estate in Montreal, and did well until the Great Depression. When the Great Depression hit, and funds trailed off, he turned to drink, something that plagued him for years. Remarkably, probably in the late 40s or early 50s, a Catholic Priest apparently told him to stop drinking and he did then and there, cold turkey. Even more remarkably, my Grandmother suffered a miscarriage with what would have been her eighth child and went to a Priest, maybe the same one, and asked if she could stop performing the Marital Debt. He said she could. That means that my grandfather, for the last ten or more years of his life, didn’t drink anymore, which is where he had taken refuge from stress, and also lived in a sexless marriage, which must have added enormously to his stress. Amazingly, he seems to have actually pulled his act together, and lived out the balance of his life as a happy guy before dying at age 58. His siblings, however, never got to where they trusted him and that ended up being taken out, after his death, on his widow and surviving children.
That’s an extreme example, of course, but there are a couple of others. Something afflicted my mother, but nobody has a clue as to what it was. She recovered from a condition pronounced to be terminal, and therefore the early diagnosis was either wrong, or her recovery was miraculous (which is what I think it was). Her recovery, while real, was never complete, however. As another example, one of my cousins on this side of the family, named after my mother, and one year older than me, was so conscious of anxiety being a factor in her makeup, she purposely chose a scientific lab career in order to avoid it. In her early 60s, the impacts of this have not hit her, but she’s dying of cancer presently.
I know now that anxiety has impacted me my entire adult live, although largely unacknowledged by me. I don’t recall it being a factor at all until I was an adult, but the trauma of what I went through as a teen probably didn't help, long term. The first time I really experienced it was when I worried about going to basic training, but I got over it quickly when I was there. After that, it became clear to me that I experienced travel anxiety, which is a condition that is something that uniquely occurs in some people. It’s hard to explain. Ironically, I've traveled in my adult life a huge amount, and generally like where I'm going, once I'm there.
It’s when I became a litigator that I really became conscious of anxiety, however.
Litigation is an extremely stressful career as it is. Anxiety runs rampant in the field. According to the ABA, for lawyers in general, a study revealed:
•64 percent of lawyers report having anxiety.
•28 percent lawyers suffered from depression
•19 percent of lawyers had severe anxiety
•11.4 percent of lawyers had suicidal thoughts in the previous year
And that’s just regular lawyers.
There have been study after study on this topic, and they all come about the same, with some coming out much worse. I’ve seen one article that has dissed these findings, but just one. My guess is that probably double these figures (except for the self reporting anxiety, which would amount to a statistical impossibility) would be the case for litigators.
Indeed, I’ve long noted that most litigators actually won’t try a case. I have tried a lot of cases, and one of the reasons why is that I’ve always been conscious of the duty not to allow a person’s anxiety to keep them from dutifully fulfilling their duty to their client. I”ve sometimes worried, in fact, that I might possibly try more cases than others in order to counter the fact that anxiety might be infusing my views, but I don't think that's the case. Anyhow, anxiety in litigation is so bad, as noted, that a majority of litigators actually won’t try a case. I've always just been aware that it was there, can impact how you think, and set it aside.
In other contexts, I’ve long seen the impact of anxiety working itself out in destructive ways in the legal field. I’ve known lawyers who were drug addicts or alcoholics, or who engaged in other destructive life choices. I’ve known two who quit practicing due to anxiety, one self-declaring that and the other just not being able to overcome an addiction to alcohol otherwise. One really well respected plaintiff’s lawyer actually disappeared from his household and family for a couple of weeks until he was found in a hotel in another state where he’d gone on a profound days long bender. Three I’ve been aware of just disappeared, two resurfacing in a seminary and one in the People’s Republic of China.
This all being the case, while I’ve been a successful lawyer, law probably wasn’t a field that I should have gone into. One lawyer friend of mine from Germany, whom I remarked to on this, dismissed this, saying “you are an intellectual, your choice was to become a lawyer or a priest”, which is an interesting way of looking at it, but had I been smarter, I’d probably have chosen the path of my scientific cousin in order to avoid the stress.
It doesn't matter now. Like the Hyman Roth character in Godfather II, "This is the business we've chosen". And by and large, it worked out well. Being honest with myself, I've been able to do a lot of interesting things, and have constantly learned new fields and topics, all the time. If you are an autodidatic polymath, it's hard to imagine a field that would actually offer so much as the law. And if you do like visiting obscure places, at least prior to COVID, it really allowed you to.
In saying all of this, what I’m saying now is that looking back on the past horrible year, I can look back decades and see the points at which the stress rose up and made me act in ways I never would have, although never in a professional sense. Each time, really, was a cry for help, but cries for help don’t really come through that way if they’re not posed that way. And sometimes, there is no existential help, you just need to pick up your pack and carry on.
This past year, however, with the fog of post-surgery depression setting in, I was really unaware of it.
I should have been, as I didn’t mentally feel right. I did keep mentioning that “I feel slow”, but that means you feel slow. The real warning was when I absolutely exploded on two partners who have been keeping a long running irritating argument going for years, permanently ending it. It needed to end, but blowing up on them was the wrong thing to do, and in retrospect I’m amazed that I wasn’t told to take a hike.
In Catholic theology there’s something called “the problem of evil”, which boils down to “why does God allow bad things to happen”. There are various answers to that question, but a universal partial response is that God doesn’t allow something to occur if he cannot bring good out of it. In our temporary lives that can be awfully hard to accept, but I believe it to be true. In this instance, I can now in fact see this at work. In a way, this allows me to go back, but clear minded, to the beginning of my career as I now approach its end, but to be a kinder, more thoughtful person, and a more grateful one. I do believe that people can and do change if they wish to, and while it’s not as if I’m now going to become an Iron Man competitor, or something, I am in a way following a bit of the same path taken by a friend who was very bitter about his legal career, and openly so, but in the last few years has become very grateful for it. I have a lot to be thankful for.
I also have the chance now to beat anxiety that was lurking there, rather than to sort of give into PTSD, which is basically what I have had in a way. That condition, known as combat fatigue originally, or shell shock, has been determined to be much wider than originally thought, and the frequent comparisons of litigation to combat are pretty accurate. But knowing what’s what is frankly more than half the battle.
Part of that also I think is following a bit of what Alcoholics Anonymous and other addition programs have in their “twelve steps”. I’m not saying I need to join AA or NA, or something but rather the page AA took from the advice of a Catholic Priest, which is similar to what Jews do on Yom Kippur, is to apologize to people you’ve hurt. I’ve done that with four people already, which is probably the set I needed to. But beyond that, part of it is being more tolerant to the people and conditions we routinely encounter, something that is difficult in a judgmental profession like the law.
So, in the end, I’m grateful to have an outside professional let me know what was going on, and that its connection to surgery, twice will remediate, and indeed already are. But beyond that, I’m grateful for the door it opened and which I’m walking through to be more aware.
The Arming and Departure of the Knights (of the Round Table), a tapestry. I feared Uncle Mike was going into the Kennedy at Camelot point of view of things, but he didn't. This tapestry, as idealized as it is, might serve as a pretty good reflection of the 60s and of the Arthurian legend, which features adultery, armed conflict, and defeat. Not cheery.
I really like Uncle Mike's blog. It's one of two I have up here by New Yorkers (the other being City Father), and on a website like this you're going to get some nostalgia, like it or not, but it can serve to really reflect how our recollections of the past are pretty messed up in some instances.
Uncle Mike's essay starts off:
The Summer of 1963 was a beginning for some, and an ending for many more. America would never quite be so young again as it was that year.
The essay goes on from there to note a bunch of stuff that happened in 1963, and does a really nice job of it. I was prepared to condemn it, but I can't upon reading it. The part I'd still object to is the opening line. "Never quite be so young again"?
Well, maybe, but in part because 1963 was on the cusp of the real 1960s. 1963, quite frankly, was in the late 1950s, era was. The 1960s, as I've written here before, actually started in 1964 or 1965. I guess that means I'm placing myself as being born in the cultural 50s, but I'd also note that the real 1950s featured the Korean War, the Cold War, conscription, and a host of other bad stuff.
A lot of which were going on in the early part of the calendar 60s, some of which Uncle Mike notes.
Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country. We can have that again, but to do that, we must vote Joe Biden out. #RTM2023
Eh?
The view of the world that seemingly many people have about the past. Even as this great Rockwell was being painted, the greatest war the world has ever fought was raging, which was part of Rockwell's "why we fight" point. We'd win, but bring it to an end by using an atomic bomb, something that stained our morality in the cause and which has been a burden on the world every since. And at the time that this was painted, there was no freedom to sit where you wanted, if you were black, in much of the US. The "innocence" of our past is never as innocent as we might suppose.
I remember growing up that we were losing the Vietnam War and inflation was destroying my parent's savings.
I don't like a lot of the way things are headed now, but we weren't living in a Normal Rockwell painting at any point in the past.
Nikki Haley was born in 1972, which means that she's a decade younger than me (thank goodness the GOP has some candidates that aren't 120 years old). That means that she grew up in the 70s and 80s.
I don't know if I have a more accurate recollection of being young than other people seemingly do, or if I lack a gene which causes us to romanticize the period of our youth. Either way, the 1970s weren't exactly all skittles and beer, or whatever the proper analogy was. Inflation was rampant, we lost the Vietnam War, Iran took our embassy staff hostage. . . you recall all that, Nikki?
Life wasn't actually all that simple if your parents were constantly worried about the price of absolutely everything. The cost of gasoline was a weekly topic. Watergate's investigations were on the news.
Do I remember how simple life was?
Yes, because I was a kid. For most kids, life is a joy because you are a kid. Same with being a teenager, really.
I was in my late teens and early 20s in the early 80s. For part of that time I lived at home, and I hunted and fished as I would. Sure, life was simple, because I had no financial worries, being a single guy with no responsibilities whatsoever.
Even at that stage, however, your DNA will come in and pull the brakes and levers. Pretty soon you are worrying, or should be, about your future, including your economic future. And you'll start to look for what modern boneheaded lexiconites call "a partner", meaning a spouse. It's the way of the world.
None of that is simple.
So was that time about faith, family, and country? Maybe where Nikki lived, but where I lived, probably less so. Everyone, pretty much, where I lived at the time, and where I still do, was a cultural Christian, and the mainline Protestant churches were still strong. This was before the onset of Southern Populism brought about by that great Republican hero, Ronald Reagan. I'm Catholic, of course, but the shift was notable. To people just a little older than me there was disruption in the Catholic Church as reformers came in and took out the altar rails, etc., but I didn't hear much about that at home really, probably as I was a kid. Now that I'm far past being a kid, I don't really appreciate a lot that was done to the Church in that period, by which I do not mean Vatican II.
Anyhow, people were at least culturally Christian here, and this is the least religious state in the United States. People who weren't Christians were likely Mormons. So I suppose she has a point there.
On family, I suppose, at that time, most families were intact. Roe v. Wade and Hugh Hefner had started the march to Obergefell, so there were things occurring that were destructive going all the way back to the 1950s, if not before. The 70s was the real heyday of the Sexual Revolution, and it permitted the entire atmosphere of the culture. Playboy was sold at the grocery stores in the checkout lines, with the rack designed to camouflage most of the girl on the cover. Moral decay hadn't set in, in the really perverse ways that would take off in the 1990s, but it had started.
What about "country".
Well, amongst the young, in the 70s, not so much, and yes. I was in the National Guard for most of the 1980s, but frankly we didn't wear our uniforms off duty if we could avoid it, and we didn't bring it up in casual conversation. Part of that was to avoid getting a lecture from somebody our own age, a lingering aspect of the Vietnam War. The military recovered under Reagan, but social attitudes weren't what they became later, where everyone was thanking you for your service. More likely, somebody was going to ask "why?" if you were in the service, or maybe even give you a lecture.
None of which is to say that we don't have a moral dumpster fire going on in our society right now. But what led us to that was long in coming and will take real work to address. It isn't as if Joe Biden came in, and it was like electing Caligula. Our prior President, after all, has a history of behavior that the late Hugh Hefner would have approved of.
The point?
Well, Haley brings up some valid things about the current reprehensible state of affairs. But it would require a lot more work than voting Joe Biden out. It's a pretty deep cultural operation, really.
This one is dedicated to trucks, more specifically work trucks.
I've always had a thing for trucks. And by that I mean real trucks. Not the cards mascarading as trucks that are so common today.
I'm sure I picked this up as a kid.
My father always had a truck. Indeed, he always had a truck when most men of his occupation had cars, and perhaps a truck at home (most did). Most men who did what my father did, and at the time he did it they were all men, drove a car to work day by day. Not my father. He drove a truck.
One of my cousins with my father's 1956 Chevrolet pickup truck.
I don't think my father ever actually owned a car of his own, although he co-owned there with my mother after they were married. Before my grandfather died in the late 1940s, and my father worked as a teenager at the company packing house, my father drove a packing house sedan that had been converted into a truck. It was a 1949 Chevrolet Sedan that had the bonnet removed from the truck, and a box installed.
If that doesn't sound like a truck, rest assured it is. The suspensions on late 40s and early 50s sedans were pretty truck like. I myself had a 1954 Chevrolet Sedan for many years, and I drove it fishing fairly routinely, just like you would a truck. I've owned two other cars since then, and I'd certainly not do that with them.
He had the 1949 prior to going into the Air Force and when he came back out, he bought the truck depicted above, the only new one he ever owned. He had that until some point in the 1960s. I'm told that I cried when he traded it in.
At that time, he acquired a 1965 Chevrolet Camper Special, which oddly enough was a half ton. I recall it well. A stick shift, light green truck with a white tonneau tarp, he had it for many years. I learned how to drive on it. Indeed, when I was old enough to test for my license at age 16, he had only just recently replaced it with a 1972 GMC. I can recall this as I had a hard time with the driving test as I took it on my parent's 1973 Mercury Comet, which I later owned. It was an automatic and I kept going to shift during the test, something which was emphasized by the fact that I was nervous.
I already owned a type of truck at that time, that being what the Army called a 1/4 ton utility truck or vehicle. I.e., a Jeep. Mine was a 1958 M38A1, my first vehicle.
In buying it, I acquired a 4x4, something my father had never owned. Unfortunately for me, or maybe fortunately, the engine was shot when I got it, so like the first car in the ballad Our Town, it didn't go far. It established a precedence, however. I've never been without a 4x4 since, and I've owned two more Jeeps, one of which I currently drive almost every day.
The 58 M38A1 was ultimately replaced by a 1974 F100 4x4 pickup, a light half ton. It's amazing to think that the 74 was "old" when I got it, as couldn't have been more than six or so years old in reality. It was well-used however, and I only drove it for a year or so before I traded it in, myself, for a Dodge D150, the first great truck I ever owned.
Also, a 1974, it was, as Dodge used to advertise, "job ready". Suspended more like a modern 3/4 ton, it was rough riding and tough as nails. I drove it well into college, even though by that time I already had a second truck, a 1962 Dodge W300. Ultimately, I sold it to my father, it becoming the only 4x4 truck he ever owned. He drove it until it died, and truth be known, he didn't live much longer after that. It's odd to think that he was younger than I am now when he bought it from me, and used it until both he and it really could go no further.
As you can probably tell, I've owned a lot of trucks over the years. If you stick to just pickup trucks, I've owned seven of them, of which four were half tons and the remainder one tons (or heavier). All have been 4x4s. If you include Jeeps as little trucks, which I think they are, I've owned an additional three.
I'm likely done buying them. The last one I bought that I regularly drive I've had now almost twenty years. Petroleum vehicles are coming to an end, and at age 60, I'm also coming to an end.
But I've never gotten over my love for real trucks, and hence this blog on them.
Today In Wyoming's History: February 8: 1943 1943 A B-25 landed on a highway near Douglas due to low fuel. Attribution. Wyoming State Historical Society.
I've actually seen something similar occur. When I was a teenager, I was riding in his pickup truck when an A-26 landed in a field near the Interstate Highway, and then taxied up to the DOT fence. The plane was on its way back to the Smithsonian and had lost oil pressure, requiring the pilot to make an emergency landing.
U.S. Economic Stabilization Director James F. Byrnes ordered a temporary ban on the sale of shoes until the following day, when shoe rationing officially commenced.
Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose and Abid Hasan were given safe passage from Germany back to Asia on board the U-180. Bose, an opponent of English Colonialism, sided with the Germans and Japanese during the war. He had been in Nazi Germany since April 1941.
The journey would lead to a Japanese submarine, which would take him to Sumatra, where he attempted to revive the Indian National Army.
Schenkl and Bose.
Bose left in Germany Emilie Schenkl and their daughter Anita. Bose may have been married to Schenkl, although the circumstances of their union are ambiguous, having been conducted as a secret Hindo ceremony without witnesses. They had met in 1934 during a previous Bose stay in Austria, when she had worked for him as a secretary. He would not publicly acknowledge their marriage or union. His departure left her without a livelihood.
Bose died in a crash of a Japanese aircraft in 1945. Schenkl lived until 1966. Anita is a professor at the University of Augsburg.
Bose retains a sort of hero status in India for his opposition to the English, but it's hard to get past siding with the Axis and abandoning his family without support.
Civil control of Hawaii was partially restored, absent the Japanese American pre-war members of the Territorial Legislature.
The Germans killed the remaining 4,000 Jewish residents of Slutsk, Byelorussia. On the same day, the Germans launched Operation Hornung, a counter-attack against Belorussian partisans.
Byelorussia suffered enormously during the Second World War, and had suffered before that under Stalin's repression. As with Poland, the Soviet government had murdered its intelligentsia in the period leading immediately up to 1941. Following that, the Nazis were nearly as repressive of its population as they were of the Poles. The Germans nearly forcibly conscripted young Belorussian men into police service, with the only real alternative being Soviet partisan service, which also conscripted. Often membership in one or the other was simply by chance. It was occupied by the Germans well into 1944.
The Red Army retook Kursk.
Wiley B. Rutledge was confirmed as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He'd only serve for six years, dying at age 55 in 1949 due to a stroke.
He had an unusual career, starting off with the goal of studying law at Maryville College, but then switching to the University of Wisconsin as a chemistry student. He graduated in 1914 with a bachelor's in that field at age 20. He thereafter returned to law, studying first at Indiana University and then, after various stints of teaching, the Colorado Law School in Boulder. He married his former Greek teacher, five years his senior, in the interim. He graduated with a Bachelor of Laws, then a common law degree, in 1922, at which time he would have been 26 years old. He worked principally as a law professor thereafter, until being appointed to the DC Circuit in 1939, and then on to the Supreme Court in 1943. Extremely studious and hardworking, in some ways, he worked himself to death.
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.
Feels pretty darned cold to me. And I'm not the only one.
I've been married now for almost 30 years, and for most of that time, I've been cold at home. During the winter, the thermostat is kept low, not for economic reasons, but because "it's not cold in here". The heat doesn't even tend to really come on here, on a permanent basis, until the snow starts flying.
As soon as spring hits, most years, the swamp cooler comes on. I hate air conditioning anyway, but its set at freeze, or something.
This year I got a bit of a break on that as for some reason my wife didn't turn it on very often. It did come on, but not like it has in most years. So summer wasn't brutally cold, indoors.
In contrast, the air conditioning was on at work after it got fixed. I was hoping it wasn't going to get fixed, as I hate it. But it was. There are only a couple of occupants of my quarter of the building, and one of them is one of the people who thinks it's hot in the building, so on it came.
Oddly, while its intermittent now, it's still on, and somebody thinks they have to have the blower on even if the air conditioning is not on.
We didn't have air conditioning in the house when I was a kid.
But it sure was a staple of employment around here for a long time, including when I was young, although the handwriting was already on the wall then.
Casper got its start as a railhead. That is, it was the penetration of the railroad into central Wyoming, not the oil industry, that brought the town about. Nonetheless, even from its earliest days dreams of petroleum riches dominated the economic thought of the town, overshadowing the actual industries that were here at first.
Starting as early as the 1890s, however, local oil exploration brought refining to Casper. And World War One caused it to explode. We've written about that here:
As we've already addressed this topic, to a large degree, I'll forgo doing that again in depth. But I will note that for decades here, indeed most of the 20th Century, petroleum refining provided good, blue collar, industrial jobs at good wages for local people.
And that's exactly how it went. People graduated from high school, or perhaps attended junior college for a while, and then found work at one of the three refineries. They were trained there and worked their way up in classic blue collar occupations, like being a machinist, for example.
The loss of those jobs, for the most part, has made a permanent change in the economics of the town, and in its culture as well. Refining, save for the remaining Sinclair refinery, has been decoupled from production. Jobs that offered stable careers. . . they keep refining even during a recession, have gone away, with many of the remaining blue collar jobs centered in oil and gas exploration, which is very much subject to the fluctuations in the petroleum economy.
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