Recommended Reading

    My mother sometimes talked about the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918.  She was 18 and the flu hit young people very hard...(it had to do with the vigor of their immune system).  Her sister, Ella, died and her brother, Oscar, came home from Alberta, Canada where he was farming, got sick and almost died.  Their brother, John, was in a military camp in the south and he, too. got sick.  WW I had a major impact on the spread of the Flu.  As many as 100,000 million people worldwide may have died.
   The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry tells not only the story of the flu but also the history of the rise of modern medicine.  Germ theory had recently been developed and clinicians were beginning to understand viruses.  His explanation of the nature of viruses is very helpful.  The flu may have been one of the factors leading to WW II because President Wilson came down with the flu during the peace negotiations after WW I.  Too sick to hold out for a balanced peace accord Britain and France imposed draconian peace terms which left Germany vulnerable to the rise of Hitler. I think it is a very important book.
    Quite a different book is The Checkered Years: A Bonanza Farm Diary 1884-88.  Mary Dodge Woodward moved from Wisconsin with her adult sons to keep house while they managed the 1500 acre farm.  A very literate woman she kept this diary which often records what she and her sons were reading.  It provides very interesting insights into what was a very harsh life.

The Art Of Travel

    "We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or 'human flourishing'." from the quirky little book by Allain De Botton, The Art of Travel.
     De Botton also writes about a visit he made to a tropical island.  In a travel brochure he saw a picture of a palm tree on a tropical beach.  It was so appealing that he decided to make a trip to the island.  When he arrived he was disappointed, even though the island was as it had been described. No.  His disappointment lay in the fact that he had brought himself along on the journey, and, that included  all of his internal issues.
     I've been intrigued by how excited some people get when they are in a far distant country and they meet someone from their home state or home town,  Oh, I do find it mildly interesting but not nearly as fascinating as an encounter with someone who is native to that far off land.  Perhaps that's why, when I travel, I avoid places where Americans hang out. There are enough opportunities to socialize with Americans when I'm in America.  Maybe that's some of the difference between a traveler and a tourist.
    As I suggested in my Oct. 21, blog the unexpected things we encounter in travel often create the adventures and the stories we later tell.

A Good Argument for Military Draft. (From 11/15/15 Writer's Almanac)

It was on this day in 1940 that 75,000 men were called to Armed Forces duty under the first peacetime conscription in American history. There had been a long history of resistance to mandatory military service in this country. During World War I, an estimated 3 million young men refused to register, and 12 percent of those called up didn't report for duty or deserted. Franklin Roosevelt's decision to impose a draft in the summer of 1940 was especially controversial because the country wasn't even at war. But Americans had all seen newspaper and newsreel coverage of the German Army rolling over Poland in a few weeks, and doing the same in France in a few months. By June of that year, Germans controlled most of the European continent, and the United States had a poorly trained standing army of only about 200,000 soldiers. So even though he worried it might hurt his chances of re-election that November, Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the first peacetime draft in American history. That October, 16 million young men appeared at precinct election boards across the country to register with the Selective Service. The first lottery was held in Washington, D.C., and it was designed to be as patriotic a ceremony as possible. Secretary of War Henry Stimson was blindfolded with cloth taken from a chair that had been used at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the ladle he used to scoop out numbers had been made from the wood of one of the rafters of Independence Hall. After the selection process, the first 75,000 draftees were called up to service on this day in 1940. During World War II alone, the draft selected 19 million men and inducted 10 million. The draft lapsed briefly after World War II, but the Red Scare persuaded Truman to start it up again, and it continued until 1973. Most Americans were happy about the end of the draft, but in 1999 the historian Stephen Ambrose wrote: "Today, Cajuns from the Gulf Coast have never met a black person from Chicago. Kids from the ghetto don't know a middle-class white. Mexican-Americans have no contact with Jews. Muslim Americans have few Christian acquaintances ... But during World War II and the Cold War, American [men] from every group got together in the service, having a common goal - to defend their country ... They learned together, pledged allegiance together, sweated together, hated their drill sergeants together, got drunk together, went overseas together. What they had in common - patriotism, a language, a past they could emphasize and venerate - mattered far more than what divided them." The Curmudgeon says:  "I don't know how patriotic we were but the Marines were certainly  a melting pot.  Yes, my life long friend is an Iowa farmer.  But, before the Marines I knew no Blacks, Mormons,  Mexicans, men from Louisiana, Asians, etc.  There are other good reasons to re-instate the draft and the issue may soon be forced by the lack of volunteer enlistments."

Memory Time from The Writer's Almanac.

Corn Picking 1956 - Afternoon Break  by Tom Hennen Listen Online I needed a heavy canvas jacket riding the cold red tractor, air an ice cube on bare skin. Blue sky over the aspen grove I drove through on the way back to the field, throttle wide open, the empty wagon I pulled hitting all the bumps on the dirt road. In the high branches of the aspens little explosions now and then sent leaves tumbling and spinning like coins tossed into the air. The two-row, tractor-mounted corn-picker was waiting at the end of the corn rows, the wagon behind it heaped so high with ears of corn their yellow could be seen a mile away. My father, who ran the picker, was already sitting on the ground, leaning back against the big rear wheel of the tractor. In that spot out of the wind we ate ham sandwiches and doughnuts, and drank hot coffee from a clear Mason jar wrapped in newspaper to keep it warm. The autumn day had spilled the color gold every- where: aspen, cornstalks, ears of corn piled high, coffee mixed with fresh cream, the fur of my dog, Boots, who was sharing our food. And when my father and I spoke, joking with the happy dog, we did not know it then, but even the words that we carelessly dropped were left to shine forever on the bottom of the clear, cold afternoon. "Corn Picking 1956 - Afternoon Break" by Tom Hennen from Darkness Sticks to Everything. © Copper Canyon Press, 2013. Reprinted with permission. (

From The Writer's Almanac 11/12/15

It was on this day in 1954 that Ellis Island formally closed its doors after processing more than 12 million immigrants to the United States in its more than a half century of service. Before 1890, when President Harrison designated it the first federal immigration center, the states had previously managed immigration themselves. New York's Castle Garden station had single-handedly processed more than 8 million newcomers in the previous 40 years. As conditions in southern and eastern Europe worsened, and demand for religious asylum increased, officials prepared for what would be soon be the greatest human migration in the history of the world, deciding to greet the "huddled masses" before they ever hit shore. On January 1st, 1894, a 15-year-old Irish girl named Annie Moore became the first person to be ushered through the gates at Ellis Island. The original Great Hall was built of southern yellow pine and served well until a fire in 1897 burned it to the ground along with all the country's immigration records dating back to 1855. The government rebuilt quickly with fireproof concrete this time. First- and second-class passengers arriving in the U.S. were waved pass the island and given just a brief inspection on board to check for obvious disease. After docking in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, the poorer third-class and steerage passengers were ferried to the island by barge where they underwent more thorough interviews. Officials observed the immigrants as they climbed the staircase into the main hall and marked a simple chalk code on the coats of those they suspected to be sickly. If you were in good health and your story checked out, processing might only take about five hours. Only 2 percent of all immigrants that passed through the gates were turned away, often for infectious disease. The facilities expanded constantly to meet the growing throngs of people, and engineers steadily increased the footprint of the island by dumping ship's ballast and piling up landfill from construction of the first subway lines. The island was eventually expanded tenfold to roughly 30 square miles. In the year 1907 alone, more than a million people passed through the center. With the dawn of World War I, immigration from Europe began to slow. The Red Scare and a growing backlash against foreigners at home soon brought it to a crawl. After 1924, laws were passed allowing immigrants to be processed at foreign embassies, and Ellis Island was made into a detention center for suspected enemies. On this day in 1954, the last detainee was released and the island was formally decommissioned. Abandoned for decades, in 1984 the island began the largest restoration undertaking in U.S. history, creating an Immigration Museum that has now drawn more than 30 million visitors. Today almost 40 percent of Americans can trace their ancestry through the gates of Ellis Island.