The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 3

Hurricane Dora hit a couple weeks into the new school year. The lead story in that morning’s News-Journal featured an illustration of a swirling Hurricane Dora with an arrow pointed right at Daytona. Still, our parents sent us to school. Midway through the day, the nuns made us pray for Dora to hit somewhere other than Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church/School/Shrine/Nunnery. They finally sent us home. 

My father evacuated us to the mainland. We went as far as a motel along U.S. 1. I spent the night listening to WROD 1340 on my transistor radio and tracing Dora’s progress on the tracking map I ripped out of the morning paper. At the window, I watched the gusts batter the palms.

The storm brushed by Daytona and moved on to St. Augustine and Jacksonville. We returned to our modest house in an Ormond Beach community designed for middle-class vacationers and now was temporary home to the migrating hordes of engineers, technicians, and accountants planning the moonshot. The hurricane had turned our house into a white cinder-block island surrounded by murky water. We turned our picnic table upside down to make a raft and poled across the backyard.

During the next couple years, we bought a house in Daytona and stayed put. The ninth kid was born. We visited the Jacksonville zoo and marveled at the city’s new shopping mall. In January 1967, right in the middle of Father Lopez Green Wave basketball season, my father announced that the need for accountants on the Apollo Moon Mission was coming to an end, at least in Florida. He could stay with G.E. but only if he agreed to be transferred to Cincinnati. He had a big family to feed. Other G.E. employees who declined to move to Cincinnati or Schenectady or Boston now were pumping gas or checking in Georgia tourists at beachside motels. 

The good news about him leaving is that he didn’t want to drive his 1960 Renault Dauphine to Ohio during the winter. Since I had conveniently passed my driving test in December, he was leaving me his car and chauffeuring duties for the ten people remaining at our Hartford Avenue house which was going up for sale on Monday.

Next: Cincinnati or bust?

Agnes McDermott: The open road in an open car

A recommendation letter written on official stationery from United States Post-Office No. 18859, Mason, Ohio:

July 27, 1914

To Whom It May Concern:

            This letter will introduce you to Miss Agnes McDermott, who was employed by me for three and one half years, as Assistant Post Mistress, at this office. This work consisted of general office work, together with some bookkeeping.

            As to her integrity, honesty, capability and Christian character, I have the highest respect, only words of praise to offer in her behalf.

            It is a pleasure for me to recommend her, and I do so knowing from personal observation, that she is worthy of any position she may seek.

            Very Truly,

            Orville L. Girton, Postmaster

Nice rec letter. It came to me with other family documents. It was in two pieces, paper brown with age, frayed edges. I had to tape it together to read it.

I see my 25-year-old grandmother leaving her job with the fresh letter in hand intent on seeking a new and worthy position in Warren County, Ohio, only 22 miles away from downtown Cincinnati. Mason had but 737 residents when Agnes joined the P.O.

I don’t know what Agnes did after leaving the P.O. I do know that she lived with relatives, her sister Julia and brother Leo. I know that she took a road trip with chums to Colorado sometime between 1918-1920. Or maybe she and her pals set off for Colorado the summer after she left the P.O. Whenever she went, it was no mean feat. Motorcars were such a new addition to the landscape that highways were almost nonexistent.

I have no “On the Road” journal entries from Agnes but I do have plenty from Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower’s First Transcontinental Motor Convoy in the summer of 1919. Army cars and trucks drove 3,251 miles from D.C. to San Francisco in 62 days. You can read the convoy’s daily log online. The log reported that the roads that my grandmother and friends drove from Ohio to Colorado were chucky, pine brick, fair but very dusty, gumbo mud, sandy with some quicksand, soft sand gumbo and, intermittently, good gravel roads. West of North Platte, Neb., many of the convoy's vehicles had to be rescued from a 200-yard stretch of quicksand. Dust was a constant problem, clogging carburetors and fuel lines. Cars and Army trucks broke down and slid off of bad roads. 

Agnes didn’t get to travel across Wyoming as she and her pals detoured south to Colorado. Eisenhower & Company encountered lots of Wyoming wind (no surprise) and rickety bridges built for travel by horse and wagon. It was good that engineer unit was part of the convoy as they had to strengthen some bridges and rebuild others.

Eisenhower was late to cross-country travel. Between 1913-16, suffragists made at least three long-distance automobile trips to promote the suffrage amendment. The earliest, according to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, was in 1913 when women drivers from all 48 states took turns driving cross-country collecting signatures on petitions calling for a national suffrage amendment. These women crusaders confronted some of the same problems as Eisenhower’s expedition although they didn’t have a platoon of engineers to help them over the rough spots. Sara Bard Field’s and Marie Kindberg’s 1915 tour in an open-air Oldsmobile included a “machinist” and she saw plenty of action. In 1916, Nell Richardson, Alice Burke and their kitten Saxon drove their “Golden Flier” 10,000 miles visiting cities coast-to-coast.

Grandma was not a suffragist. Somehow, she and her friends made it the 1,194 miles to Denver and explored the Rocky Mountains by automobile along dirt roads, some little more than one tracks cut into a steep mountainside that probably got its start as a mule trail or even a trail blazed by Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes. Grandma loved the mountains and returned to stay. 

Agnes may have used her post office reference while job hunting. She worked as a domestic when she met my grandfather, Martin Hett, at a Hibernian Club function. Cities with largest Irish immigrant populations boasted at least one chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, named after references to ancient Ireland by the Greeks and Romans. Denver had three AOH clubs.

My grandparents were an odd match, this tiny ex-postmistress from Ohio a decade older than my tall, lanky and uneducated Irish grandfather. They were married in 1922 and had three children. The middle one became my mother, Anna Marie Hett.

I knew my grandmother as a nice lady who treated us kids to ginger ale and cookies. By the time I moved back to Denver in 1978, she had been dead for four years from complications of arteriosclerosis. In those days, it was called “hardening of the arteries” or that is how it was referred to by my mother the nurse. I was 23 when grandma passed, too busy at school to travel from Daytona Beach to Denver for the funeral. I couldn’t imagine her younger and pregnant, someone who gave birth to my statuesque mother and her sister and their 6-foot-5 baby brother who played college basketball. Whatever was in my mother’s DNA cocktail added to her husband’s Shay-Green mix, brought me to six-feet-tall by the seventh grade and my short but memorable stint as a high school b-baller.

I have nothing written in Agnes’s hand. I can find plenty of official documents online through ancestry.com. Birth certificate, death certificate, census records. Some blank spaces in her personal life cry out to be filled in but, it many cases, there’s nobody around to do that.

I imagine my grandmother tootling along with her pals in an open-top Model T. The road is rough, the way, dusty. She leaves behind her dreary old Ohio burg. She looks ahead, ready for new adventures in a new place. The wind riffles her hair. She can’t imagine that one day it will turn gray and she will be betrayed by the arteries bearing oxygenated blood to a brain trusted by the U.S. Post Office in Mason, Ohio.

But that is exactly what happens.

The Great 2016 American Political Spectacle is running at full throttle

Some of you may be wondering what hummingbirdminds thinks of the current election cycle.

OK, maybe you don't, but hummingbirdminds is going to tell you anyway.

I'm here in Wyoming watching the primary season and wondering how Hillary Clinton won all five states on the most recent Super Tuesday. Bernie Sanders came close in Missouri but, still, Clinton edged him out. Clinton claimed a wipe-out in Florida. Trump too. I ask my family and friends in Florida: Wazzup with that?

On Tuesday in Florida, GOP voter turnout was up but Democratic Party turnout was down. Sanders knew he would have to get lots of voters out to even get close to Clinton. In Missouri, voter turnout out paced 2008 turnout 39 to 36 percent. Less than 1,600 votes separated Sanders and Clinton. If several thousand of those college-age Sanders' supporters ("Feel the Bern!") had voted, well, the results would be different.

Whom do I support? My politics are more aligned with Democratic Socialist Sanders than with Democratic Moderate Clinton. But in November I just want to win, baby. Trump is dangerous, Cruz is creepy, and Kasich is a moderate but he keeps saying crazy stuff to get attention amongst all the Trump hoopla. What about the new effort to draft Paul Ryan should the Repub convention deadlock in Cleveland? Sounds far-fetched to me. Trump contends that there will be riots in Cleveland if that happens. Local police are stockpiling riot gear just in case. Interesting that the Repubs are going to the hometown of Democrat Dennis Kucinich, the anti-war liberal I supported in 2004 and 2008. He's the reason I got involved in local Democratic Party politics in 2004. The Iraq War was the issue then. And the Bush/Cheney axis of evil. Wonder what Mr. Kucinich thinks of all of this? I went to my first state party convention in 2004. Kucinich called in to our gathering although John Kerry was already the candidate-in-waiting. I didn't realize then that most of the decisions happen well before the ballots are cast. I think that we came out of that convention with one delegate pledged to Kucinich when the national convention got underway in Boston. I have some empathy for those Sanders supporters who haven't been involved in party politics. They have to be prepped for the April 9 caucus and for the state convention on May 28. Do your homework, Berniecrats! I stand ready to answer your questions.

So I'm an old hand. I've been to local caucuses and state and national conventions. I'm not jaded -- I still go to meetings and raise funds for Democratic candidates. I always vote, as do all the codgers in my district. But I no longer wonder why people are disappointed in the two political parties. If I had a chance to join and vote for the Democratic Socialists, I would do so. My neighbor Tea Party Slim would gather with the Tea Party Party or the Libertarians or the Guns for Everyone Party. My wife might be part of the Feminist Party. I could see my daughter Annie in the Green Party. My son? He's a candidate for the Transcendentalists or possibly the Gamer Party.

But now, two sizes fit all, which is ridiculous. Our choices are limited now by choices made when most of us were not paying attention. Will people start paying attention now that we're in the Age of Trump?

I have no answers. But, to us writers and bloggers, the Great 2016 American Political Spectacle is amazing.

"Good Night, Ryan:" Yet another Iraq veteran dies by his own hand

The film that accompanies Nicholas D. Kristof's New York Times story makes me incredibly sad -- and pisses me off. Why isn't more being done to take care of these young people that we send to war?

THERE’S a window into a tragedy within the American military: For every soldier killed on the battlefield this year, about 25 veterans are dying by their own hands.  

An American soldier dies every day and a half, on average, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Veterans kill themselves at a rate of one every 80 minutes. More than 6,500 veteran suicides are logged every year — more than the total number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq combined since those wars began.

Jon Stewart: New state Govs have gone psycho

The Daily Show - Gov Hurts
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Working Words: "You work, Buddy. You work."

Excerpt of a poem by Ohio's Ray McNiece from Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking out the Jams from Coffee House Press:

Grandfather’s Breath (excerpt)

You work. You work, Buddy. You work.
Word of immigrant get-ahead grind I hear
huffing through me, Grandfather’s breath,
when he’d come in from Saturday’s keep-busy chores,
fending up a calloused hand to stop
me from helping him, haggard cheeks puffing
out like t-shirts hung between tenements,
doubled-over under thirty-five years a machine
repairman at the ball-bearing factory, ball-bearings
making everything run smoother -
especially torpedoes. He busted butt
for the war effort, for profiteers, for overtime pay
down-payment on a little box of his own,
himself a refugee from the European economy,
washed ashore after “The War to End All Wars.”
Cheap labour for the winners.

Detroit poet M.L. Liebler, editor of Working Words, will read and perform some of his own poems and those from the book at 7:30 p.m. tonight at Cheyenne's Atlas Theatre. Tix are $5 for adults, $3 for students, military and seniors. He will be on stage with musician Peter Lewis, one of the founding members of Ground-breaking sixties rock group Moby Grape.

Here's how M.L. described the show (from wyomingarts):

"We'll do some of the songs that are sort of more or less poetic, songs we've written together and then Peter will perform acoustically some of the Moby Grape songs from his group, some of his own original pieces. We kind of have a nice little set where we're merging some of what we do together, some of my poetry in music, some of his Moby Grape and some of his original."

Condolences to Keith Olbermann and family -- with a shout out to James Thurber

From Keith Olbermann's blog on Saturday:

My father died, in the city of his birth, New York, at 3:50 EST this afternoon.

Though the financial constraints of his youth made college infeasible, he accomplished the near-impossible, becoming an architect licensed in 40 states. Much of his work was commercial, for a series of shoe store chains and department stores. There was a time in the 1970's when nearly all of the Baskin-Robbins outlets in the country had been built to his design, and under his direction. Through much of my youth and my early adult life, it was almost impossible to be anywhere in this country and not be a short drive to one of "his" stores.

My Dad was predeceased last year by my mother, Marie, his wife of nearly 60 years. He died peacefully after a long fight against the complications that ensued after successful colon surgery last September at the New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center. My sister Jenna and I were at his side, and I was reading him his favorite James Thurber short stories, as he left us.

My condolences to Keith and his family. My father, too, was a fan of James Thurber's short stories. Thurber was a fine writer, funny and irreverent. He wrote for The New Yorker, but his stories were made to be read aloud, unlike most contemporary stories featured in that magazine.

Here's the beginning to "The Night the Bed Fell" from the July 8, 1933, New Yorker:

I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father. It makes a better recitation (unless, as some friends of mine have said, one has heard it five or six times) than it does a piece of writing, for it is almost necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors, and bark like a dog, to lend the proper atmosphere and verisimilitude to what is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale. Still, it did take place.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1933/07/08/1933_07_08_011_TNY_CARDS_000228579#ixzz0iINK1E1r

Read it, and remember the power of good writing.