In no particular order:
A. I got this email from my Buddy and answered it. I won’t include my reply because it points a finger at a few folks and jabs hard.
Harry:
This puzzles me, at http://lincolndemocrat.com/?p=17449:
The debate about fairness and gaps was off and running again. In the end, the people on the low end of the pay totem pole lost two-bits/hr. The vote was a 3-3 tie. In the boardroom a tie is a loss for those trying to pass something. For readers counting the “yous,” there were only six Board members present. Member Sandstad had been granted another “excused” absence, though I’d bet a quarter she would have been another ‘nay’ vote with her DFL-endorsed comrades.
Why wouldn’t board members who are DFL-endorsed, be more likely to vote for the pay raise than those board members who aren’t so endorsed?[your Buddy]
emails aren’t really priorities but common place daily experiences. Answering them all can become a priority especially after I’ve neglected going through them for a while.
B. Finishing the last half of the Pulitzer bio of Andrew Jackson will wait although I hope to add it to this year’s reading list as completed. In the meantime I found another book I’m falling in love with Founding Rivals about James Madison and James Monroe. The author is an attorney and political consultant not an historian but I fell in love with another of his books on the six living presidents who were still alive at the start of the Civil War.
He packs a lot into his books with great economy.
C. Continuing three days of searching into old newspapers from a newspaper data base which pulls out stories based on, among other things, Last names. I’ve printed out a hundred or more stories on my grandparents lineages – Welty, Robb, McLatchey, Marsh. I’m putting their histories into timelines.
D. I am persuing the Robb timeline with a deadline of the Next Armistice (Veterans) Day. I’ll be attending yet another memorial to my Grandfather this time in Topeka, Kansas. Some bricks with his name on them or something will be placed somewhere. I am attempting to put tons of material together for my own curiosity in the hopes someday of writing about him – one of the dozen books I continually threaten to write. Pay no attention to the man behind the typewriter! Maybe the Topeka VFW would like to put it in their library if I ever crank it out.
E. Gathering more information on Topeka’s history of integration. I’m sure you remember Brown vs. Board of Education. This post evidently marks at least its sixteenth mention in the blog. It made it to my old website as well – here and here.
I just sent an inquiry to the Brown v. Board of Education national historical site asking them if they could tell me the name of the segregated black school who’s students were sent to my Loman Hill Elementary in 1958 when I was in second grade. I’ll visit it when I travel to Topeka in November. BTW My father’s mother attended the original “Monroe School” (there’s that name again). She would ride her horse to it, hop off, and the horse would find its way home.
I got interested in looking this information up because Claudia is half way through one of the books assigned to a seminary class she is taking. Its the autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Ida was so fed up with the murders and lynchings of respectable black Memphis citizens that she eventually encouraged them to go west young black man. Many ended up in Topeka in the neighborhood called “Tennesee Town” that was a block from Loman Hill Elementary. Claudia finds “Crusade for Justice” a damned sight more readable than a lot of her other text books.
F. On the subject of lynchings – I just deposited my pay for playing “Mike” in the teaser which hopes to tease some money out of investors for a movie about Duluth’s famous lynching. Duluth and Topeka have ties to this event. Clayton Jackson, one of the victims was from Topeka. A Topeka attorney represented his interests in the ugly court case which followed. As Michael Fedo’s book makes clear the court was in the awkward position of finding at least one black man guilty of a rape that never happened.
BTW – Without that lynching Brown of Board of Ed might never have taken place. Roy Wilkins, a black Minnesotan was attending the University of Minnesota in 1920 and the shock of an anti-black lynching that far North made him switch his studies to law. He was instrumental in pointing the NAACP to Topeka when they began their assault on Plessy V Fergusson.
Oh yeah! And I finally got past Psalms. 137 inspired
the short story I read in high school that I mistakenly thought was meant to describe a post apocalyptic nuclear world. It was post apocalyptic just not nuclear.
As for Proverbs, the next book in line, here’s one for you: Proverbs 12:16 “Fools show their anger at once, but the prudent ignore an insult.”
Oh and one more goodie: In all the old clippings I discovered that my teacher ancestors were “elected” to their jobs. In a 1909 story which had a list of their newly raised monthly salaries ( by five dollars!) I discovered my grandmother, Winona McLatchey, (later to be Mrs. George Robb) was going to earn $50’s a month. That’s a ten percent pay raise! What was her School Board thinking?
