Recommended Reading.

     An attorney in our neighborhood book club chose Devil In The Grove: Thurgood Marshall, The Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, Gilbert King as our July book.  King won the Pulitzer Prize for this book that tells they story of Thurgood Marshall as a NAACP lawyer and the Groveland Boys.
     It is a gripping book and very interesting context for the recent terrorist attack at Emanuel A. M. E, Church, Charleston, SC.  Following the Compromise of 1877 in which the Democratic Party agreed not to contest the presidential election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes if federal troops were withdrawn from the south Jim Crow became the order of the day. Devil In The Grove recounts some of the last violent episodes or racial violence in Florida and the role of future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in bringing more racial justice.  The recent shooting in SC reminds us that that struggle is not over.  (See the article below from the Atlantic.)

Black Churches Are Burning Again in America

This week, there were fires in at least six predominantly African American churches. Arson at religious institutions has decreased significantly over the past two decades, but the symbolism remains haunting

“What's the church doing on fire?”
Jeanette Dudley, the associate pastor of God's Power Church of Christ in Macon, Georgia, got a call a little after 5 a.m. on Wednesday, she told a local TV news station. Her tiny church of about a dozen members had been burned, probably beyond repair. The Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco got called in, which has been the standard procedure for church fires since the late 1960s. Investigators say they’ve ruled out possible causes like an electrical malfunction; most likely, this was arson.
The very same night, many miles away in North Carolina, another church burned: Briar Creek Road Baptist Church, which was set on fire some time around 1 a.m. Investigators have ruled it an act of arson, the AP reports; according to The Charlotte Observer, they haven’t yet determined whether it might be a hate crime.

Two other predominantly black churches have been the target of possible arson this week:  Glover Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Warrenville, South Carolina, which caught fire on Friday, and College Hill Seventh Day Adventist, which burned on Monday in Knoxville, Tennessee. Investigators in Knoxville told a local news station they believed it was an act of vandalism, although they aren’t investigating the incident as a hate crime. (There have also been at least three other cases of fires at churches this week. At Fruitland Presbyterian Church in Gibson County, Tennessee, and the Greater Miracle Temple Apostolic Holiness Church in Tallahassee, Florida. Officials suspect the blazes were caused by lightning and electrical wires, respectively, but investigations are still ongoing. A church that is not predominantly black—College Heights Baptist Church in Elyria, Ohio—was burned on Saturday morning. The fire appears to have been started in the sanctuary, and WKYC reports that the cause is still under investigation. 

The town’s fire and police departments did not immediately return calls for confirmation on Sunday.*)

These fires join the murder of nine people at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church as major acts of violence perpetrated against predominantly black churches in the last fortnight. Churches are burning again in the United States, and the symbolism of that is powerful. Even though many instances of arson have happened at white churches, the crime is often association with racial violence: a highly visible attack on a core institution of the black community, often done at night, and often motivated by hate.
As my colleague David Graham noted last week, the history of American church burnings dates to before the Civil War, but there was a major uptick in incidents of arson at black churches in the middle and late 20th century. One of the most famous was the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four girls. Three decades later, cases of church arson rose sharply. In response, in 1995, President Bill Clinton also set up a church-arson investigative task force, and in 1996, Congress passed a law increasing thesentences for arsonists who target religious organizations, particularly for reasons of race or ethnicity. Between 1995 and 1999, Clinton’s task force reported that it opened 827 investigations into burnings and bombings at houses of worship; it was later disbanded.

Co-conspirator!

     yesterdaystractors.com  is my all time favorite web site.  If I'm near my computer I check it regularly to see the old tractors and machinery listed for sale.   There are also forums about tractors, repairs, machinery and other things which are both educational and entertaining.

     A few years ago I sold my bulldozer (see picture below) via this web site to a buyer in McAllen, TX.  He sent a semi truck to SD to pick it up.  The buyer was so excited about finding it that he paid me more than I'd asked for it!  My decision to sell it was prompted in part by my discovery of how hard it was to replace a track that I threw off while burying a rock pile.
    There was one project left undone when the bulldozer was sold.  There is a half mile of fence line on my farm that is almost buried in dirt, which over the years,  the wind has blown up to it,  A dirt path next to this fence connects to another  field.  Because of the dirt that has drifted in over the years the path is now several yards from the fence.  With the bulldozer in TX, I began thinking about hiring someone with a maintainer...also called road grader or a blade...to do the work.
   Perusing my favorite web site a couple of weeks ago to look at the tractors for sale I noticed a road grader for sale.  "Perfect" I thought...except "it's too far away."  It was at Cedar Falls, IA, which is 340 miles from my farm.  "Fine". I thought. "this is such a gem it will sell immediately so I'll wait a week to call, it will have been sold and I will say 'too bad I really wanted it' and the decision will be made."
   Well......a funny thing happened...I called and it was still for sale. The owner answered all my questions, sent more pictures, some of which I specifically requested, and now I was hooked. Looking for someone more knowledgeable than I, T.M. came to mind.  Knowing that T.M. didn't work Fridays about 8:30 a.m. Friday I emailed him the picture ad, added a note about my intention for using it, and asked his opinion.  As soon as I sent the email I phoned T.M. and as he picked up the phone and before anything else was said he said "buy it."
   There are times in this nutty hobby of mine I need a co-conspirator.  This was one of those times. T.M. talking about how fun it would be was all I needed.  With some negotiation the owner soon agreed on a price.  So, this is the way I've become a proud owner of a road grader...though I have yet to see it in person.

The bulldozer, now in McAllen, TX.

'49 WD Allis Chalmers Road Grader...next stop SD.

Personal History with GI Bill

   Discharged from the Marines in 1962 I enrolled at Augustana College to finish my degree. Following graduation I enrolled in Luther Seminary.  In the 50s the G.I. Bill was discontinued and was not re-instated until 1966.  By that time I was on internship so I collected benefits for only my senior year and for some continuing education after graduation.

(Copied from the 6/22/2015 Writer's Almanac)

"On this this day in 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, popularly known as the GI Bill of Rights.

Economists in the '40s were predicting a postwar depression, and politicians were terrified of the idea of 9 million unemployed veterans wandering the country. So they wrote the GI Bill to guarantee unemployment benefits for a year. A congressional committee threw in the idea that veterans should get money to go to college, although even the supporters of the bill didn't think that many GIs would really want to go - but about a million veterans applied for the money within the first year after the war. Professors at the time said the veterans were the most serious students they'd ever seen.

Prior to World War II, only 53,000 Americans held college degrees. By 1947, veterans accounted for half of the nation's college enrollment, which swelled to 500,000 by 1950."

Find me in this picture.

One of My Favorite Authors

It's the birthday of novelist and poet Louise Erdrich (books by this author), born in Little Falls, Minnesota (1954). She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. Her mother was French Ojibwe and her father was German American; she grew up in a big family, the oldest of seven children, with lots of extended family nearby. She said: "The people in our families made everything into a story [...] People just sit and the stories start coming, one after another. You just sort of grab the tail of the last person's story: it reminds you of something and you keep going on. I suppose that when you grow up constantly hearing the stories rise, break and fall, it gets into you somehow." Her parents encouraged her writing - her father even paid her a nickel for every story she wrote. When she was a teenager, her mother found a picture inNational Geographic of ice sculptures at Dartmouth College, and it piqued her interest since Dartmouth was historically dedicated to educating Native Americans. Erdrich was accepted as part of the first class to admit women. It was also the first year of Dartmouth's new Native American Studies program, run by a young professor named Michael Dorris, whom she eventually married. Erdrich said of writing: "I was in college and had failed at everything else. I kept journals and diaries when I was a kid, and I started writing when I was nineteen or twenty. After college I decided that that's absolutely what I wanted to do. Part of it was that I did not prepare myself for anything else in life." After graduation, she returned to North Dakota and worked as a resident poet in the schools, driving all over the state in her old pickup truck. She often went out to the local bar in whatever town she happened to be visiting, and there she heard all kinds of fascinating stories. She was writing poetry, but she was frustrated by it, and she finally realized that she was trying to tell too many stories in her poems, and that what she really needed to write was fiction. She thought about the people she had known growing up in Wahpeton and on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, and about various conversations she had had in bars around North Dakota, and she started writing a book that was a collection of stories told by a whole chorus of characters. By this time, she was living in Fargo, renting a tiny apartment above a flower shop. She said, "It was heaven to have my own quiet, beautiful office with a great window and green linoleum floors and a little desk and a view that carried to the outskirts of Fargo." Eventually she set her book aside, convinced that she needed to write a more conventional novel. In the meantime, she published her first short story, called "Saint Marie." She got two letters in response: one from an angry priest who felt she had misrepresented his religion, and the other from Philip Roth, who said he liked it. She was too shy to write back but it inspired her to keep writing. Her novel was rejected by everyone she sent it to, so after a while she gave it up and went back to her first book, and that became Love Medicine(1984), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her novels include The Beet Queen (1986), The Master Butchers Singing Club(2003), The Plague of Doves (2008), and The Round House (2012). This  is copied from The Writer's Almanac.  I've read The Plague of Doves three times.