#Spring Creek Township

[tmarshconnors]

“The price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.”

Robert Houghwout Jackson was an American lawyer, jurist, and politician who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1941 until his death in 1954.

Born: 13 February 1892, Spring Creek Township, Pennsylvania, United States

Died: 9 October 1954 (age 62 years), Washington, D.C., United States

Supreme Court Justice: Robert H. Jackson served as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1941 to 1954. He was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Nuremberg Trials: Jackson is perhaps best known for his role as the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. These trials were historic as they prosecuted major Nazi war criminals for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.

Legal Career: Before his appointment to the Supreme Court, Jackson held several significant positions, including Solicitor General (1938-1940) and Attorney General (1940-1941). His tenure in these roles was marked by his strong defense of New Deal legislation.

Influential Opinions: As a Supreme Court Justice, Jackson authored several important opinions. Notably, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), he wrote the majority opinion that declared it unconstitutional to force public school students to salute the flag, emphasizing the protection of individual rights against government mandates.

Literary Style: Jackson was renowned for his eloquent and clear writing style. His opinions are often cited for their literary quality and persuasive power. His legal writings continue to be studied and admired for their clarity and rhetorical force.

[ambiguouspuzuma]

The Fisher King

From time to time a visitor would ask how he came to be known as the Fisher King, and he would tell them a story.

There were once three brothers. That was how such stories often start, and the Fisher King's was no exception. Three heirs, each covetous of the throne. They were triplets, and each felt their birthright was to rule, rather than be set aside as younger sons were sometimes wont to be.

Their ailing mother, the Patchwork Queen, was alive to their jostling, and agreed for her realm to be divided into thirds, in the hope that such a measure might sate each of their appetites. A map was made, and divided into quadrants. The brothers then drew lots, and were able to claim their preferred sectors in turn.

The first brother, the largest and most martial of the three, chose the castle which was the seat of his family's power. The second, the eldest by seconds, chose the woodland that surrounded it. The third, bookish and retiring, chose the river that gave access to their gate, controlling their passage out into the wider realm.

There was some overlap, when a particularly tempting choice was left unclaimed, but broadly that passage was repeated. The first brother to choose laid claim over most of the major fortresses. The second monopolised the fertile fields, the woodland held for hunting. They dovetailed at every third selection: the first brother taking a curtilage of suitable land around a palace, the second securing a tower of his own from which to oversee his forests.

The third brother let them squabble over the choicest cuts. As they tightened their grip over a prosperous region, a strategic township, he focused on the borders in-between. The creeks which delineated their villages. The brooks which fed their thirsting fields. He claimed the foothills from which springs arose, the empty valleys through which hostile rapids ran.

He did not advertise his intentions - commenting only on the beauty of a region, his professed love for wildlife, a rare species of kingfisher which he hoped to one day sight - but nor did he have to hide them well. His brothers were well occupied with their own struggle, ordering their selections to best pre-empt the other, ranking the more obvious targets in their minds. They dismissed him as a distracted academic - focused on irrelevant aesthetic virtues, unable to play the game strategically - and were only grateful when he stayed out of their way.

When the Patchwork Queen passed, there was an early period of peace. The brothers shared their possessions: allowing passage through a field in exchange for its protection, use of a fortress to store the harvest in exchange for a commensurate share. There was trading, to a degree, and harmony across the realm.

But tensions simmered over time. An unfair bargain, forced by one side's desperation. A deal not kept, with excuses which failed to convince. Each brother had something the other needed, but their distribution was far from equal. Their power waxed and waned with the seasons, and each imbalance led to perceived abuses: scores which were settled the next time that the tables turned. As ever with such things, they were always paid back with interest. The escalation only grew, and it was hard to see it ever coming down.

It was then that the third brother tightened his noose. Having monopolised the waters of the realm, he had existed thus far in peace: allowing the currents to flow as freely as they always had, and living off the little land he owned. But when his brothers were divided, their weaknesses exposed, he finally made his play: threatening to dam each watercourse at source, and leave their worlds to wither down the line.

"I can survive on the fish that I catch," he proclaimed. "But your men can't subsist on grain or stone alone. Your fields need water. Your people need water. Pay me a tithe, and I will make sure it comes. Swear me allegiance, and I will quench all of your deadly thirst."

"You did that?" the visitors would ask. "Such a way to consolidate your power. Ruthless, perhaps, but also wise. I see now why they call you the Fisher King. You showed great patience, as an angler watching over his pool; letting your brothers focus on the bait, as all the while you tightened your net."

"No," he would have to tell them. "What my brother did was wrong, as well as foolhardy. We had no choice but to kill him."

"Your brother? Then you-"

"I had the armies of the realm, loyal to me. When it came to war, as he insisted with the laying of this gauntlet, only one of us was going to emerge victorious. He might have had the rivers, and our brother might have had the fields, but I had the strength to take what wasn't mine. That's the lesson, here, if you insist in learning one. Wisdom and cunning are all very well, but they are nothing compared to power. You cannot play the game with nothing in your hand."

"But they call you the Fisher King?"

At this, their host would nod. "A fisherman is patient, yes, but there's no room for wisdom in his strike. He is far from a devious predator. He simply arms himself, with weaponry more lethal than his prey, and waits for them to swim into his grasp - or worse, to seek to attack him. He does nothing, except be stronger than they are - his hook far sharper than their teeth, his arms more muscular than fins. My brother was a trout, thinking that he could snatch my bait away from me - but didn't count upon my steel. So now I fish in his lakes, still searching for the peace that he once took from me. Now I rule - but only because the halfwit chose to bite me first."

[360nw]

Hope Springs Eternal - June 2022

Hope Creek Nuclear Generating Station is a thermal nuclear power plant located in Lower Alloways Creek Township, in Salem County, New Jersey, United States, on an Artificial Island and on the same site as the two-unit Salem Nuclear Power Plant.  Wikipedia

[goalhofer]

2024 Pittsburgh Pirates Roster

Pitchers

#23 Mitch Keller (Cedar Rapids, Iowa)

#26 Bailey Falter (Chino Hills, California)

#27 Marco Gonzales (Ft. Collins, Colorado)*

#28 Josh Fleming (Columbia, Illinois)*

#35 Colin Holderman (Bourbonnais Township, Illinois)

#36 Dauri Moreta (Comendador, Dominican Republic)

#37 Jared Jones (La Mirada, California)**

#43 Ryan Borucki (Fremont Township, Illinois)

#45 Albertín Chapman (San Isidro De Holguin, Cuba)*

#48 Luis Ortiz (San Pedro De Macorís, Dominican Republic)

#51 David Bednar (Mars, Pennsylvania)

#54 Martín Pérez (Guanare, Venezuela)*

#59 Roansy Contreras (Peralvillo, Dominican Republic)

#61 José Hernández (San Felipe De Puerto Plata, Dom Rep)

#63 Hunter Stratton (Bluff City, Tennessee)

Catchers

#6 Yasmani Grandal (Miami Springs, Florida)*

#14 Joey Bart (Buford, Georgia)*

#32 Henry Davis (Bedford, New York)

#55 Jason Delay (Johns Creek, Georgia)

Infielders

#2 Connor Joe (San Diego, California)

#3 Ji-Hwan Bae (Daegu, South Korea)

#13 Ke'Bryan Hayes (Tomball, Texas)

#15 Oneil Cruz (Nizao, Dominican Republic)

#19 Jared Triolo (Austin, Texas)

#25 Alexander Williams (San Diego, California)

#44 Ryan Tellez (Elk Grove, California)*

Outfielders

#10 Bryan Reynolds (Brentwood, Tennessee)

#18 Michael Taylor (Ft. Lauderdale, Florida)*

#22 Andrew McCutchen (Ft. Meade, Florida)

#38 Edward Olivares (Santiago De León De Caracas, Venezuela)*

#65 Jack Suwinski (Chicago, Illinois)

Coaches

Manager Derek Shelton (Warren Township, Illinois)

Bench coach Don Kelly (Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania)

Hitting coach Andy Haines (Louisville Township, Illinois)

Assistant hitting coach Christian Marrero (Miami, Florida)

Bullpen coach Justin Meccage (Billings, Montana)

Bullpen catcher Jordan Comadena (Normal, Illinois)

Bullpen catcher Raúl Hernández (Maturín, Venezuela)

Pitching coach Oscar Marin (Los Angeles, California)

1B coach Tarrik Brock (Goleta, California)

3B coach Mike Rabelo (New Port Richey, Florida)

Infield coach Mendy López (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic)

Strategy coach Radley Haddad (Carmel, Indiana)

Assistant coach Stephen Morales (Mayagüez, Puerto Rico)

Assistant coach Jonny Tucker (Oakland, California)

[cleanwaterchronicles]

EGLE at youth fishing events this summer focusing on assessing fish contaminants

Source: EGLE newsroom

The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) was awarded a $600,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to assess contaminants in fish in several areas of Michigan -- with a particular focus on water bodies where youth fishing events have historically or are currently taking place.

Brandon Armstrong, EGLE aquatic biology specialist, filets a rainbow trout for a successful angler at the Wayne County Parks youth fishing derby at Waterford Bend Recreation Area in Northville. 

The primary goal of EGLE’s Fish Contaminant Monitoring Program is to collect data that are used to inform the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services’ Eat Safe Fish guide. This grant helps EGLE meet this goal by providing funds to assess contaminants in fish from water bodies nearby communities that may be disproportionately impacted by environmental hazards, often referred to as Environmental Justice areas. EGLE will be attending youth fishing events near these areas to collect samples for contaminant monitoring.

Upcoming events include:

The Public Safety Youth Derby at Muskegon Lake in Muskegon, from 4 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 15.

The Buell Lake Fish Camp at Buell Lake Park in Clio from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday, June 16.

The Brighton Optimist Club Derby at Brighton Mill Pond in Brighton from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. on Saturday, June 17.

The Global Water Festival at Canal Park in Grand Rapids from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, July 29.

The Thread Lake Fish Camp at Thread Lake’s McKinley Park in Flint from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday, August 11.

Events that already have taken place as part of the grant are:

Wayne County Parks Derby at Waterford Bend Park in Northville.

Saginaw County Parks’ Catch Me If You Can family fishing festival at Haithco Lake in Saginaw Charter Township.

The Hesse-Earl Youth Fishing Program at Hawk Island Park in Ingham County.

Fish will also be collected under this grant from additional water bodies located near Environmental Justice areas including  Reflection Pond in Riverview, Spring Valley Pond in Kalamazoo, Richmond Park Pond in Grand Rapids, Battjes Park Pond in Wyoming, Galloway Lake, Osmun Lake and the Clinton River in Pontiac, Muskegon Lake and Little Black Creek in Muskegon, WmP Thompson Pond in Port Huron, Carpenter Lake in Southfield, the St. Joseph River and the Paw Paw River in Benton Harbor, and the St. Marys River in Sault Ste Marie.

Source: https://www.michigan.gov/egle/newsroom/mi-environment/2023/06/13/egle-at-youth-fishing-events-this-summer-focusing-on-assessing-fish-contaminants

[allroadsleadhomerpp]

Stackhouse, North Carolina

All Roads Lead Home is set in the picturesque town of Stackhouse, North Carolina. Tucked away in the majestic Appalachian Mountains, it can be found in the Blue Ridge Mountain range subset. Stackhouse is notorious for its blue hue shining brightly from its various peaks at sunrise and sunset. The town is a charming amalgamation of seven distinct communities, of which only three possess true townships: Downtown, Hot Springs, and Wolf Laurel. The remaining communities are just as important, layered in rich and unique history that has been attributed to the wonders of Stackhouse for the past two centuries.

Interesting Facts

Stackhouse was founded in 1851. It was historically founded by a select group of people whose family names became known as the founding families of Stackhouse, and some still live in the town to this day. 

Stackhouse County is proudly known as the “jewel of the Blue Ridge Mountains,” a title earned by its welcoming nature and thriving tourist industry. 

It is currently one of the top tomato producers in North Carolina. 

Before the tobacco buyout in the early 2000s, it was the top tobacco-producing county in the state. 

It was dubbed one of the “most welcoming small towns in North Carolina” in 2023.

The two closest cities are Asheville, North Carolina, and Johnson City, Tennessee, which are roughly 30-35 minutes away from Stackhouse. 

Stackhouse has the oldest operational courthouse in North Carolina, with the courthouse being over 100 years old and originally designed by the same architect that designed and built the Biltmore House.

Must Visit Places

Appalachian Trail is one of the most iconic long-distance hiking trails in the world, stretching approximately 2,200 miles along the eastern United States, from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. The trail passes through 14 states and traverses a diverse range of landscapes, including mountains, forests, meadows, and valleys. The trail is dotted with shelters, typically spaced a day's hike apart, where hikers can rest for the night.

Hot Springs was formerly known as Warm Springs, renamed Hot Springs for the Hot Springs spa and while it's a smaller, less financial savvy town it’s well known for the mineral filled hot springs that the spa sits on top of. It’s a very free spirited town that welcomes people from all backgrounds and walks of life and thrives off of the differences of personalities that reside in the town.

The Magnolia Inn & Restaurant, nestled in the charming town of Hot Springs, North Carolina, offers a cozy and inviting retreat for visitors seeking relaxation and comfort. It offers a delectable dining experience, showcasing locally sourced ingredients and regional cuisine. From hearty breakfasts to gourmet dinners, guests can indulge in flavorful dishes crafted with care. The restaurant's cozy atmosphere and attentive service make it a favorite among locals and visitors alike.

Max Patch is a scenic mountain bald located in the Pisgah National Forest near Spring Creek. The main attraction of Max Patch is its expansive grassy summit, which offers panoramic views of the surrounding mountains, including the Great Smoky Mountains to the south and the Black Mountains to the north; also, it's home to a variety of wildlife and plant species, making it a haven for nature enthusiasts. 

Paint Rock is the large rock cliff borders the river and gives some unique views from the top. The base has a lot of graffiti and cravings decorating the rock face and is a hot spot for sunning and swimming. It’s a great vantage spot for selfies and sunset pictures. It holds cultural and historical significance as a site of Native American art and heritage. The petroglyphs and pictographs are considered sacred by many Indigenous communities and serve as a tangible link to the region's rich Native American history.

Stackhouse Bed & Breakfast is the ancient Victorian-style house that was the family home for the Stackhouse family for almost two centuries. The twelve-bedroom house serves as a bed & breakfast in the Stackhouse Valley for tourists and campers so they get a taste of southern hospitality and experience the deep history of the house. Owned and operated by Ida Stackhouse, the current Stackhouse Matriarch, the home was converted into a bed & breakfast in 2013 after the death of Ida's husband, Louis.

The Town of Runion is the old logging town that was abandoned at the turn of the 20th century and is like it’s own unique ghost town. It’s a favored spot for camping and late-night parties, but in the daylight, you can see the skeletons of the old town and how busy it was back then. 

Wolf Laurel Ski Resort & Lodge is located in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina and offers a picturesque winter sports experience. The resort features a variety of terrain suitable for skiers and snowboarders of all skill levels. With a summit elevation of around 4,700 feet, the slopes range from gentle beginner runs to challenging expert trails, providing something for everyone. The resort boasts a five-star restaurant, a superb dance club, and other relaxing amenities that bring in a lot of the tourism needed for Stackhouse to survive

[steveskafte]

CLEAR REASONING When the sun shines high in a cloudless sky, I feel low. The best solution is getting lower still, down in the trickling hollows where rock walls rise to block the light. Number Five Brook seems a curious name with no clear reasoning, but that title was simply chosen as it was the fifth stream east into the historic Granville Township. It followed Granville Line Brook, Sabeans Brook, Schoolhouse Brook, and Starratt Brook. That's a long defunct division now, the former townships forgotten and dissolved into their constituent counties. Not that any of those political boundaries ever made an impact on this ancient creek, of course. Only one path ever bridged it, locally known as the Old Vault Road, and even that's been abandoned since before I was born. It's running fairly near to dry now, which is expected, with only a scattering of springs and ponds upstream to feed it. But watch this space, perfectly capable of becoming a raging torrent when a wet woods conspires to drain this way. From here to the sea in a rush you can't restrain. July 20, 2024 Outram, Nova Scotia Year 17, Day 6096 of my daily journal.

[traipseartist]

May 8th - To Medicine Bow we Go

The morning in Jackson was fruitful upon our waking. I had told Lewis I wanted boots, blades, and breakfast before 10am and I intended to get them. We walked around the small town square and I was drawn to things that were not on my target, but I gleefully retail therapy'd anyway. We ate burritos from a kiosk that called itself D.O.G. and we decided it was better if we didn't know what it stood for.

Jackson was sleepy but more receptive to the morning tourist, the snow had leveled off and the sun had even threatened to make an appearance.

Despite its oddities though, we had no problem snaking our way through Mountain Man toys and grabbing coffee before sliding back into Stacey and pointing westward towards Medicine Bow in Southeast Wyoming. Jackson surprised us on the way out with moose, bounding deer, herds of bison, and a never ending bike path.

The snow did not stay its hand, and as we putted on through the last of the Tetons and Shoshone National Forest, we found ourselves and thousands of trees coated in the fluffy sugar, bowing under the weight. We braced ourselves for another white out and found the whimsical path give way to even more rolling hills. When was Wyoming supposed to get boring and flat, again?

However, the highlight of the day was yet to come. As we plowed on across the innards of the WY state, we found ourselves far away from the burrito in our bellies and in need of a beer and a thought. Picking a middle point that sounded interesting, we stopped at the only bar between us and our next major way-point: The Split Rock Bar and Cafe (and Gas).

Jeffrey City's sign claimed a population of 50 but the barkeep's husband and the owner of Jeffrey City Gas (the gas station...er... two pumps attached to the cafe), a man named Dusty, claimed that the town used to be home to thousands who worked in the uranium mines on the edge of the incorporation. Dusty was a font of knowledge. He explained the long lines of wooden slat pallets propped up along the sides of the Wyoming highways (snow deflectors), the namesake of the place (a mountain down the road with a "gun notch" at the top and a crack that runs itself right down to the ground), and the reason Google Maps wouldn't direct us through the heart of Medicine Bow (the pass was usually snowed in till June). He wore a jacket I'm sure had never seen a detergent in its decades in existence and his wife Isebela paced back and forth behind the bar with her white, fluffy mutt in tow, keeping busy and tending to some French travelers at the end of the counter sipping Lipton tea in quaint ceramic cups and looking bewildered. She didn't even blink when Lewis and I nearly shouted "That one!" when she had said "New Belgium" after listing six other disappointing domestic brews and one Mexican one.

With Dusty's good advice we struck out for our home for the night: The Mountain View Historic Hotel in Centennial just on the other side of the pass, and found ourselves petting Stacey's tender dash while we traversed gravel roads. The land was so flat and the light so stark on these back tracks we could not help but stop and put our feet on the dusty soil, investigating some trees that had taken root oddly in the distance.

It seems they were growing right out of the creek! The wind blew solemnly over the plains, rattling their not-yet-budding branches. Spring was still to come to this valley.

We wound our way finally into Centennial, a town of 200 at the foot of Sugar Loaf Mountain and ate a frozen pizza fresh from Friendly's bar--the only establishment open after 8pm on Wednesday in the township.

After more cryptics and beer and talk with listless locals and visitors alike, we laid our heads down in a small suite above a local cafe, and dreamed of tomorrow's Nebraska.

[southjerseyweb]

Harrison Township mayor speaks after large hole opens up along Raccoon Creek

… in New Jersey. ABC 7 Chicago New 67 views · 1:29. Go to channel … South Jersey drive-in decides to open early due to spring-like temperatures.

[hellsitesonlybookclub]

It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 11-12

CHAPTER XI

WHEN I was a kid, one time I had an old-maid teacher that used to tell me, "Buzz, you're the thickest-headed dunce in school." But I noticed that she told me this a whole lot oftener than she used to tell the other kids how smart they were, and I came to be the most talked-about scholar in the whole township. The United States Senate isn't so different, and I want to thank a lot of stuffed shirts for their remarks about Yours Truly.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

BUT there were certain of the Heathen who did not heed those heralds Prang and Windrip and Haik and Dr. Macgoblin.

Walt Trowbridge conducted his campaign as placidly as though he were certain to win. He did not spare himself, but he did not moan over the Forgotten Men (he'd been one himself, as a youngster, and didn't think it was so bad!) nor become hysterical at a private bar in a scarlet-and-silver special tram. Quietly, steadfastly, speaking on the radio and in a few great halls, he explained that he did advocate an enormously improved distribution of wealth, but that it must be achieved by steady digging and not by dynamite that would destroy more than it excavated. He wasn't particularly thrilling. Economics rarely are, except when they have been dramatized by a Bishop, staged and lighted by a Sarason, and passionately played by a Buzz Windrip with rapier and blue satin tights.

For the campaign the Communists had brightly brought out their sacrificial candidates—in fact, all seven of the current Communist parties had. Since, if they all stuck together, they might entice 900,000 votes, they had avoided such bourgeois grossness by enthusiastic schisms, and their creeds now included: The Party, the Majority Party, the Leftist Party, the Trotzky Party, the Christian Communist Party, the Workers' Party, and, less baldly named, something called the American Nationalist Patriotic Cooperative Fabian Post-Marxian Communist Party—it sounded like the names of royalty but was otherwise dissimilar.

But these radical excursions were not very significant compared with the new Jeffersonian Party, suddenly fathered by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Forty-eight hours after the nomination of Windrip at Cleveland, President Roosevelt had issued his defiance.

Senator Windrip, he asserted, had been chosen "not by the brains and hearts of genuine Democrats but by their temporarily crazed emotions." He would no more support Windrip because he claimed to be a Democrat than he would support Jimmy Walker.

Yet, he said, he could not vote for the Republican Party, the "party of intrenched special privilege," however much, in the past three years, he had appreciated the loyalty, the honesty, the intelligence of Senator Walt Trowbridge.

Roosevelt made it clear that his Jeffersonian or True Democratic faction was not a "third party" in the sense that it was to be permanent. It was to vanish as soon as honest and coolly thinking men got control again of the old organization. Buzz Windrip aroused mirth by dubbing it the "Bull Mouse Party," but President Roosevelt was joined by almost all the liberal members of Congress, Democratic or Republican, who had not followed Walt Trowbridge; by Norman Thomas and the Socialists who had not turned Communist; by Governors Floyd Olson and Olin Johnston; and by Mayor La Guardia.

The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxation rates but with baptism by immersion in the creek, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst in a desert and quenching it with spring water—all the primitive sensations which they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz Windrip.

Far from the hot-lighted ballrooms where all these crimson-tuniced bandmasters shrillsquabbled as to which should lead for the moment the tremendous spiritual jazz, far off in the cool hills a little man named Doremus Jessup, who wasn't even a bass drummer but only a citizen editor, wondered in confusion what he should do to be saved.

He wanted to follow Roosevelt and the Jeffersonian Party—partly for admiration of the man; partly for the pleasure of shocking the ingrown Republicanism of Vermont. But he could not believe that the Jeffersonians would have a chance; he did believe that, for all the mothball odor of many of his associates, Walt Trowbridge was a valiant and competent man; and night and day Doremus bounced up and down Beulah Valley campaigning for Trowbridge.

Out of his very confusion there came into his writing a desperate sureness which surprised accustomed readers of the Informer. For once he was not amused and tolerant. Though he never said anything worse of the Jeffersonian Party than that it was ahead of its times, in both editorials and news stories he went after Buzz Windrip and his gang with whips, turpentine, and scandal.

In person, he was into and out of shops and houses all morning long, arguing with voters, getting miniature interviews.

He had expected that traditionally Republican Vermont would give him too drearily easy a task in preaching Trowbridge. What he found was a dismaying preference for the theoretically Democratic Buzz Windrip. And that preference, Doremus perceived, wasn't even a pathetic trust in Windrip's promises of Utopian bliss for everyone in general. It was a trust in increased cash for the voter himself, and for his family, very much in particular.

Most of them had, among all the factors in the campaign, noticed only what they regarded as Windrip's humor, and three planks in his platform: Five, which promised to increase taxes on the rich; Ten, which condemned the Negroes—since nothing so elevates a dispossessed farmer or a factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, on which he can look down; and, especially, Eleven, which announced, or seemed to announce, that the average toiler would immediately receive $5000 a year. (And ever-so-many railway-station debaters explained that it would really be $10,000. Why, they were going to have every cent offered by Dr. Townsend, plus everything planned by the late Huey Long, Upton Sinclair, and the Utopians, all put together!)

So beatifically did hundreds of old people in Beulah Valley believe this that they smilingly trotted into Raymond Pridewell's hardware store, to order new kitchen stoves and aluminum sauce pans and complete bathroom furnishings, to be paid for on the day after inauguration. Mr. Pridewell, a cobwebbed old Henry Cabot Lodge Republican, lost half his trade by chasing out these happy heirs to fabulous estates, but they went on dreaming, and Doremus, nagging at them, discovered that mere figures are defenseless against a dream... even a dream of new Plymouths and unlimited cans of sausages and motion-picture cameras and the prospect of never having to arise till 7:30 A.M.

Thus answered Alfred Tizra, "Snake" Tizra, friend to Doremus's handyman, Shad Ledue. Snake was a steel-tough truck-driver and taxi-owner who had served sentences for assault and for transporting bootleg liquor. He had once made a living catching rattlesnakes and copperheads in southern New England. Under President Windrip, Snake jeeringly assured Doremus, he would have enough money to start a chain of roadhouses in all the dry communities in Vermont.

Ed Howland, one of the lesser Fort Beulah grocers, and Charley Betts, furniture and undertaking, while they were dead against anyone getting groceries, furniture, or even undertaking on Windrip credit, were all for the population's having credit on other wares.

Aras Dilley, a squatter dairy farmer living with a toothless wife and seven slattern children in a tilted and unscrubbed cabin way up on Mount Terror, snarled at Doremus—who had often taken food baskets and boxes of shotgun shells and masses of cigarettes to Aras—"Well, want to tell you, when Mr. Windrip gets in, we farmers are going to fix our own prices on our crops, and not you smart city fellows!"

Doremus could not blame him. While Buck Titus, at fifty, looked thirty-odd, Aras, at thirty-four, looked fifty.

Lorinda Pike's singularly unpleasant partner in the Beulah Valley Tavern, one Mr. Nipper, whom she hoped soon to lose, combined boasting how rich he was with gloating how much more he was going to get under Windrip. "Professor" Staubmeyer quoted nice things Windrip had said about higher pay for teachers. Louis Rotenstern, to prove that his heart, at least, was not Jewish, became more lyric than any of them. And even Frank Tasbrough of the quarries, Medary Cole of the grist mill and real-estate holdings, R. C. Crowley of the bank, who presumably were not tickled by projects of higher income taxes, smiled pussy-cattishly and hinted that Windrip was a "lot sounder fellow" than people knew.

But no one in Fort Beulah was a more active crusader for Buzz Windrip than Shad Ledue.

Doremus had known that Shad possessed talent for argument and for display; that he had once persuaded old Mr. Pridewell to trust him for a .22 rifle, value twenty-three dollars; that, removed from the sphere of coal bins and grass-stained overalls, he had once sung "Rollicky Bill the Sailor" at a smoker of the Ancient and Independent Order of Rams; and that he had enough memory to be able to quote, as his own profound opinions, the editorials in the Hearst newspapers. Yet even knowing all this equipment for a political career, an equipment not much short of Buzz Windrip's, Doremus was surprised to find Shad soap-boxing for Windrip among the quarry-workers, then actually as chairman of a rally in Oddfellows' Hall. Shad spoke little, but with brutal taunting of the believers in Trowbridge and Roosevelt.

At meetings where he did not speak, Shad was an incomparable bouncer, and in that valued capacity he was summoned to Windrip rallies as far away as Burlington. It was he who, in a militia uniform, handsomely riding a large white plow-horse, led the final Windrip parade in Rutland... and substantial men of affairs, even dry-goods jobbers, fondly called him "Shad."

Doremus was amazed, felt a little apologetic over his failure to have appreciated this new-found paragon, as he sat in American Legion Hall and heard Shad bellowing: "I don't pretend to be anything but a plain working-stiff, but there's forty million workers like me, and we know that Senator Windrip is the first statesman in years that thinks of what guys like us need before he thinks one doggone thing about politics. Come on, you bozos! The swell folks tell you to not be selfish! Walt Trowbridge tells you to not be selfish! Well, be selfish, and vote for the one man that's willing to give you something—give you something!—and not just grab off every cent and every hour of work that he can get!"

Doremus groaned inwardly, "Oh, my Shad! And you're doing most of this on my time!"

Sissy Jessup sat on the running board of her coupe (hers by squatter's right), with Julian Falck, up from Amherst for the week-end, and Malcolm Tasbrough wedged in on either side of her.

"Oh nuts, let's quit talking politics. Windrip's going to be elected, so why waste time yodeling when we could drive down to the river and have a swim," complained Malcolm.

"He's not going to win without our putting up a tough scrap against him. I'm going to talk to the high-school alumni this evening— about how they got to tell their parents to vote for either Trowbridge or Roosevelt," snapped Julian Falck.

"Haa, haa, haa! And of course the parents will be tickled to death to do whatever you tell 'em, Yulian! You college men certainly are the goods! Besides—Want to be serious about this fool business?" Malcolm had the insolent self-assurance of beef, slick black hair, and a large car of his own; he was the perfect leader of Black Shirts, and he looked contemptuously on Julian who, though a year older, was pale and thinnish. "Matter of fact, it'll be a good thing to have Buzz. He'll put a damn quick stop to all this radicalism—all this free speech and libel of our most fundamental institutions—"

"Boston American; last Tuesday; page eight," murmured Sissy.

"—and no wonder you're scared of him, Yulian! He sure will drag some of your favorite Amherst anarchist profs off to the hoosegow, and maybe you too, Comrade!"

The two young men looked at each other with slow fury. Sissy quieted them by raging, "Freavensake! Will you two heels quit scrapping?... Oh, my dears, this beastly election! Beastly! Seems as if it's breaking up every town, every home.... My poor Dad! Doremus is just about all in!"

CHAPTER XII

I SHALL not be content till this country can produce every single thing we need, even coffee, cocoa, and rubber, and so keep all our dollars at home. If we can do this and at the same time work up tourist traffic so that foreigners will come from every part of the world to see such remarkable wonders as the Grand Canyon, Glacier and Yellowstone etc. parks, the fine hotels of Chicago, & etc., thus leaving their money here, we shall have such a balance of trade as will go far to carry out my often-criticized yet completely sound idea of from $3000 to $5000 per year for every single family—that is, I mean every real American family. Such an aspiring Vision is what we want, and not all this nonsense of wasting our time at Geneva and talky-talk at Lugano, wherever that is.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

ELECTION day would fall on Tuesday, November third, and on Sunday evening of the first, Senator Windrip played the finale of his campaign at a mass meeting in Madison Square Garden, in New York. The Garden would hold, with seats and standing room, about 19,000, and a week before the meeting every ticket had been sold—at from fifty cents to five dollars, and then by speculators resold and resold, at from one dollar to twenty.

Doremus had been able to get one single ticket from an acquaintance on one of the Hearst dailies—which, alone among the New York papers, were supporting Windrip—and on the afternoon of November first he traveled the three hundred miles to New York for his first visit in three years.

It had been cold in Vermont, with early snow, but the white drifts lay to the earth so quietly, in unstained air, that the world seemed a silver-painted carnival, left to silence. Even on a moonless night, a pale radiance came from the snow, from the earth itself, and the stars were drops of quicksilver.

But, following the redcap carrying his shabby Gladstone bag, Doremus came out of the Grand Central, at six o'clock, into a gray trickle of cold dishwater from heaven's kitchen sink. The renowned towers which he expected to see on Forty-second Street were dead in their mummy cloths of ragged fog. And as to the mob that, with cruel disinterest, galloped past him, a new and heedless smear of faces every second, the man from Fort Beulah could think only that New York must be holding its county fair in this clammy drizzle, or else that there was a big fire somewhere.

He had sensibly planned to save money by using the subway—the substantial village burgher is so poor in the city of the Babylonian gardens!—and he even remembered that there were still to be found in Manhattan five-cent trolley cars, in which a rustic might divert himself by looking at sailors and poets and shawled women from the steppes of Kazakstan. To the redcap he had piped with what he conceived to be traveled urbanity, "Guess 'll take a trolley—jus' few blocks." But deafened and dizzied and elbow-jabbed by the crowd, soaked and depressed, he took refuge in a taxi, then wished he hadn't, as he saw the slippery rubber-colored pavement, and as his taxi got wedged among other cars stinking of carbon-monoxide and frenziedly tooting for release from the jam—a huddle of robot sheep bleating their terror with mechanical lungs of a hundred horsepower.

He painfully hesitated before going out again from his small hotel in the West Forties, and when he did, when he muddily crept among the shrill shopgirls, the weary chorus girls, the hard cigar-clamping gamblers, and the pretty young men on Broadway, he felt himself, with the rubbers and umbrella which Emma had forced upon him, a very Caspar Milquetoast.

He most noticed a number of stray imitation soldiers, without side-arms or rifles, but in a uniform like that of an American cavalryman in 1870: slant-topped blue forage caps, dark blue tunics, light blue trousers, with yellow stripes at the seam, tucked into leggings of black rubberoid for what appeared to be the privates, and boots of sleek black leather for officers. Each of them had on the right side of his collar the letters "M.M." and on the left, a five-pointed star. There were so many of them; they swaggered so brazenly, shouldering civilians out of the way; and upon insignificances like Doremus they looked with frigid insolence.

He suddenly understood.

These young condottieri were the "Minute Men": the private troops of Berzelius Windrip, about which Doremus had been publishing uneasy news reports. He was thrilled and a little dismayed to see them now—the printed words made brutal flesh.

Three weeks ago Windrip had announced that Colonel Dewey Haik had founded, just for the campaign, a nationwide league of Windrip marching-clubs, to be called the Minute Men. It was probable that they had been in formation for months, since already they had three or four hundred thousand members. Doremus was afraid the M.M.'s might become a permanent organization, more menacing than the Kuklux Klan.

Their uniform suggested the pioneer America of Cold Harbor and of the Indian fighters under Miles and Custer. Their emblem, their swastika (here Doremus saw the cunning and mysticism of Lee Sarason), was a five-pointed star, because the star on the American flag was five-pointed, whereas the stars of both the Soviet banner and the Jews—the seal of Solomon—were six-pointed.

The fact that the Soviet star, actually, was also five-pointed, no one noticed, during these excited days of regeneration. Anyway, it was a nice idea to have this star simultaneously challenge the Jews and the Bolsheviks—the M.M.'s had good intentions, even if their symbolism did slip a little.

Yet the craftiest thing about the M.M.'s was that they wore no colored shirts, but only plain white when on parade, and light khaki when on outpost duty, so that Buzz Windrip could thunder, and frequently, "Black shirts? Brown shirts? Red shirts? Yes, and maybe cow-brindle shirts! All these degenerate European uniforms of tyranny! No sir! The Minute Men are not Fascist or Communist or anything at all but plain Democratic—the knight-champions of the rights of the Forgotten Men—the shock troops of Freedom!"

Doremus dined on Chinese food, his invariable self-indulgence when he was in a large city without Emma, who stated that chow mein was nothing but fried excelsior with flour-paste gravy. He forgot the leering M.M. troopers a little; he was happy in glancing at the gilded wood-carvings, at the octagonal lanterns painted with doll-like Chinese peasants crossing arched bridges, at a quartette of guests, two male and two female, who looked like Public Enemies and who all through dinner quarreled with restrained viciousness.

When he headed toward Madison Square Garden and the culminating Windrip rally, he was plunged into a maelstrom. A whole nation seemed querulously to be headed the same way. He could not get a taxicab, and walking through the dreary storm some fourteen blocks to Madison Square Garden he was aware of the murderous temper of the crowd.

Eighth Avenue, lined with cheapjack shops, was packed with drab, discouraged people who yet, tonight, were tipsy with the hashish of hope. They filled the sidewalks, nearly filled the pavement, while irritable motors squeezed tediously through them, and angry policemen were pushed and whirled about and, if they tried to be haughty, got jeered at by lively shopgirls.

Through the welter, before Doremus's eyes, jabbed a flying wedge of Minute Men, led by what he was later to recognize as a cornet of M.M.'s. They were not on duty, and they were not belligerent; they were cheering, and singing "Berzelius Windrip went to Wash.," reminding Doremus of a slightly drunken knot of students from an inferior college after a football victory. He was to remember them so afterward, months afterward, when the enemies of the M.M.'s all through the country derisively called them "Mickey Mouses" and "Minnies."

An old man, shabbily neat, stood blocking them and yelled, "To hell with Buzz! Three cheers for F.D.R.!"

The M.M.'s burst into hoodlum wrath. The cornet in command, a bruiser uglier even than Shad Ledue, hit the old man on the jaw, and he sloped down, sickeningly. Then, from nowhere, facing the cornet, there was a chief petty officer of the navy, big, smiling, reckless. The C.P.O. bellowed, in a voice tuned to hurricanes, "Swell bunch o' tin soldiers! Nine o' yuh to one grandpappy! Just about even—"

The cornet socked him; he laid out the cornet with one foul to the belly; instantly the other eight M.M.'s were on the C.P.O., like sparrows after a hawk, and he crashed, his face, suddenly veal-white, laced with rivulets of blood. The eight kicked him in the head with their thick marching-shoes. They were still kicking him when Doremus wriggled away, very sick, altogether helpless.

He had not turned away quickly enough to avoid seeing an M.M. trooper, girlish-faced, crimson-lipped, fawn-eyed, throw himself on the fallen cornet and, whimpering, stroke that roustabout's roast-beef cheeks with shy gardenia-petal fingers.

There were many arguments, a few private fist fights, and one more battle, before Doremus reached the auditorium.

A block from it some thirty M.M.'s, headed by a battalion-leader— something between a captain and a major—started raiding a street meeting of Communists. A Jewish girl in khaki, her bare head soaked with rain, was beseeching from the elevation of a wheelbarrow, "Fellow travelers! Don't just chew the rag and 'sympathize'! Join us! Now! It's life and death!" Twenty feet from the Communists, a middle-aged man who looked like a social worker was explaining the Jeffersonian Party, recalling the record of President Roosevelt, and reviling the Communists next door as word-drunk un-American cranks. Half his audience were people who might be competent voters; half of them—like half of any group on this evening of tragic fiesta—were cigarette-sniping boys in hand-me-downs.

The thirty M.M.'s cheerfully smashed into the Communists. The battalion leader reached up, slapped the girl speaker, dragged her down from the wheelbarrow. His followers casually waded in with fists and blackjacks. Doremus, more nauseated, feeling more helpless than ever, heard the smack of a blackjack on the temple of a scrawny Jewish intellectual.

Amazingly, then, the voice of the rival Jeffersonian leader spiraled up into a scream: "Come on, you! Going to let those hellhounds attack our Communist friends—friends now, by God!" With which the mild bookworm leaped into the air, came down squarely upon a fat Mickey Mouse, capsized him, seized his blackjack, took time to kick another M.M.'s shins before arising from the wreck, sprang up, and waded into the raiders as, Doremus guessed, he would have waded into a table of statistics on the proportion of butter fat in loose milk in 97.7 per cent of shops on Avenue B.

Till then, only half-a-dozen Communist Party members had been facing the M.M.'s, their backs to a garage wall. Fifty of their own, fifty Jeffersonians besides, now joined them, and with bricks and umbrellas and deadly volumes of sociology they drove off the enraged M.M.'s—partisans of Bela Kun side by side with the partisans of Professor John Dewey—until a riot squad of policemen battered their way in to protect the M.M.'s by arresting the girl Communist speaker and the Jeffersonian.

Doremus had often "headed up" sports stories about "Madison Square Garden Prize Fights," but he did know that the place had nothing to do with Madison Square, from which it was a day's journey by bus, that it was decidedly not a garden, that the fighters there did not fight for "prizes" but for fixed partnership shares in the business, and that a good many of them did not fight at all.

The mammoth building, as in exhaustion Doremus crawled up to it, was entirely ringed with M.M.'s, elbow to elbow, all carrying heavy canes, and at every entrance, along every aisle, the M.M.'s were rigidly in line, with their officers galloping about, whispering orders, and bearing uneasy rumors like scared calves in a dipping-pen.

These past weeks hungry miners, dispossessed farmers, Carolina mill hands had greeted Senator Windrip with a flutter of worn hands beneath gasoline torches. Now he was to face, not the unemployed, for they could not afford fifty-cent tickets, but the small, scared side-street traders of New York, who considered themselves altogether superior to clodhoppers and mine-creepers, yet were as desperate as they. The swelling mass that Doremus saw, proud in seats or standing chin-to-nape in the aisles, in a reek of dampened clothes, was not romantic; they were people concerned with the tailor's goose, the tray of potato salad, the card of hooks-and-eyes, the leech-like mortgage on the owner-driven taxi, with, at home, the baby's diapers, the dull safety-razor blade, the awful rise in the cost of rump steak and kosher chicken. And a few, and very proud, civil-service clerks and letter carriers and superintendents of small apartment houses, curiously fashionable in seventeen-dollar ready-made suits and feebly stitched foulard ties, who boasted, "I don't know why all these bums go on relief. I may not be such a wiz, but let me tell you, even since 1929, I've never made less than two thousand dollars a year!"

Manhattan peasants. Kind people, industrious people, generous to their aged, eager to find any desperate cure for the sickness of worry over losing the job.

Most facile material for any rabble-rouser.

The historic rally opened with extreme dullness. A regimental band played the Tales from Hoffman barcarole with no apparent significance and not much more liveliness. The Reverend Dr. Hendrik Van Lollop of St. Apologue's Lutheran Church offered prayer, but one felt that probably it had not been accepted. Senator Porkwood provided a dissertation on Senator Windrip which was composed in equal parts of apostolic adoration of Buzz and of the uh-uh-uh's with which Hon. Porkwood always interspersed his words.

And Windrip wasn't yet even in sight.

Colonel Dewey Haik, nominator of Buzz at the Cleveland convention, was considerably better. He told three jokes, and an anecdote about a faithful carrier pigeon in the Great War which had seemed to understand, really better than many of the human soldiers, just why it was that the Americans were over there fighting for France against Germany. The connection of this ornithological hero with the virtues of Senator Windrip did not seem evident, but, after having sat under Senator Porkwood, the audience enjoyed the note of military gallantry.

Doremus felt that Colonel Haik was not merely rambling but pounding on toward something definite. His voice became more insistent. He began to talk about Windrip: "my friend—the one man who dares beard the monetary lion—the man who in his great and simple heart cherishes the woe of every common man as once did the brooding tenderness of Abraham Lincoln." Then, wildly waving toward a side entrance, he shrieked, "And here he comes! My friends—Buzz Windrip!"

The band hammered out "The Campbells Are Coming." A squadron of Minute Men, smart as Horse Guards, carrying long lances with starred pennants, clicked into the gigantic bowl of the auditorium, and after them, shabby in an old blue-serge suit, nervously twisting a sweat-stained slouch hat, stooped and tired, limped Berzelius Windrip. The audience leaped up, thrusting one another aside to have a look at the deliverer, cheering like artillery at dawn.

Windrip started prosaically enough. You felt rather sorry for him, so awkwardly did he lumber up the steps to the platform, across to the center of the stage. He stopped; stared owlishly. Then he quacked monotonously:

"The first time I ever came to New York I was a greenhorn—no, don't laugh, mebbe I still am! But I had already been elected a United States Senator, and back home, the way they'd serenaded me, I thought I was some punkins. I thought my name was just about as familiar to everybody as Al Capone's or Camel Cigarettes or Castoria—Babies Cry For It. But I come to New York on my way to Washington, and say, I sat in my hotel lobby here for three days, and the only fellow ever spoke to me was the hotel detective! And when he did come up and address me, I was tickled to death—I thought he was going to tell me the whole burg was pleased by my condescending to visit 'em. But all he wanted to know was, was I a guest of the hotel and did I have any right to be holding down a lobby chair permanently that way! And tonight, friends, I'm pretty near as scared of Old Gotham as I was then!"

The laughter, the hand-clapping, were fair enough, but the proud electors were disappointed by his drawl, his weary humility.

Doremus quivered hopefully, "Maybe he isn't going to get elected!"

Windrip outlined his too-familiar platform—Doremus was interested only in observing that Windrip misquoted his own figures regarding the limitation of fortunes, in Point Five.

He slid into a rhapsody of general ideas—a mishmash of polite regards to Justice, Freedom, Equality, Order, Prosperity, Patriotism, and any number of other noble but slippery abstractions.

Doremus thought he was being bored, until he discovered that, at some moment which he had not noticed, he had become absorbed and excited.

Something in the intensity with which Windrip looked at his audience, looked at all of them, his glance slowly taking them in from the highest-perched seat to the nearest, convinced them that he was talking to each individual, directly and solely; that he wanted to take each of them into his heart; that he was telling them the truths, the imperious and dangerous facts, that had been hidden from them.

"They say I want money—power! Say, I've turned down offers from law firms right here in New York of three times the money I'll get as President! And power—why, the President is the servant of every citizen in the country, and not just of the considerate folks, but also of every crank that comes pestering him by telegram and phone and letter. And yet, it's true, it's absolutely true I do want power, great, big, imperial power—but not for myself—no— for you!—the power of your permission to smash the Jew financiers who've enslaved you, who're working you to death to pay the interest on their bonds; the grasping bankers—and not all of 'em Jews by a darn sight!—the crooked labor-leaders just as much as the crooked bosses, and, most of all, the sneaking spies of Moscow that want you to lick the boots of their self-appointed tyrants that rule not by love and loyalty, like I want to, but by the horrible power of the whip, the dark cell, the automatic pistol!"

He pictured, then, a Paradise of democracy in which, with the old political machines destroyed, every humblest worker would be king and ruler, dominating representatives elected from among his own kind of people, and these representatives not growing indifferent, as hitherto they had done, once they were far off in Washington, but kept alert to the public interest by the supervision of a strengthened Executive.

It sounded almost reasonable, for a while.

The supreme actor, Buzz Windrip, was passionate yet never grotesquely wild. He did not gesture too extravagantly; only, like Gene Debs of old, he reached out a bony forefinger which seemed to jab into each of them and hook out each heart. It was his mad eyes, big staring tragic eyes, that startled them, and his voice, now thundering, now humbly pleading, that soothed them.

He was so obviously an honest and merciful leader; a man of sorrows and acquaint with woe.

Doremus marveled, "I'll be hanged! Why, he's a darn good sort when you come to meet him! And warm-hearted. He makes me feel as if I'd been having a good evening with Buck and Steve Perefixe. What if Buzz is right? What if—in spite of all the demagogic pap that, I suppose, he has got to feed out to the boobs—he's right in claiming that it's only he, and not Trowbridge or Roosevelt, that can break the hold of the absentee owners? And these Minute Men, his followers—oh, they were pretty nasty, what I saw out on the street, but still, most of 'em are mighty nice, clean-cut young fellows. Seeing Buzz and then listening to what he actually says does kind of surprise you—kind of make you think!"

But what Mr. Windrip actually had said, Doremus could not remember an hour later, when he had come out of the trance.

He was so convinced then that Windrip would win that, on Tuesday evening, he did not remain at the Informer office until the returns were all in. But if he did not stay for the evidences of the election, they came to him.

Past his house, after midnight, through muddy snow tramped a triumphant and reasonably drunken parade, carrying torches and bellowing to the air of "Yankee Doodle" new words revealed just that week by Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch:

"The snakes disloyal to our Buzz We're riding on a rail, They'll wish to God they never was, When we get them in jail!

Chorus:

"Buzz and buzz and keep it up To victory he's floated. You were a most ungrateful pup, Unless for Buzz you voted.

"Every M.M. gets a whip To use upon some traitor, And every Antibuzz we skip Today, we'll tend to later."

"Antibuzz," a word credited to Mrs. Gimmitch but more probably invented by Dr. Hector Macgoblin, was to be extensively used by lady patriots as a term expressing such vicious disloyalty to the State as might call for the firing squad. Yet, like Mrs. Gimmitch's splendid synthesis "Unkies," for soldiers of the A.E.F., it never really caught on.

Among the winter-coated paraders Doremus and Sissy thought they could make out Shad Ledue, Aras Dilley, that philoprogenitive squatter from Mount Terror, Charley Betts, the furniture dealer, and Tony Mogliani, the fruit-seller, most ardent expounder of Italian Fascism in central Vermont.

And, though he could not be sure of it in the dimness behind the torches, Doremus rather thought that the lone large motorcar following the procession was that of his neighbor, Francis Tasbrough.

Next morning, at the Informer office, Doremus did not learn of so very much damage wrought by the triumphant Nordics—they had merely upset a couple of privies, torn down and burned the tailor-shop sign of Louis Rotenstern, and somewhat badly beaten Clifford Little, the jeweler, a slight, curly-headed young man whom Shad Ledue despised because he organized theatricals and played the organ in Mr. Falck's church.

That night Doremus found, on his front porch, a notice in red chalk upon butcher's paper:

You will get yrs Dorey sweethart unles you get rite down on yr belly and crawl in front of the MM and the League and the Chief and I

A friend

It was the first time that Doremus had heard of "the Chief," a sound American variant of "the Leader" or "the Head of the Government," as a popular title for Mr. Windrip. It was soon to be made official.

Doremus burned the red warning without telling his family. But he often woke to remember it, not very laughingly.

[ultraheydudemestuff]

Charles B. Rich House - Squire Rich Historical Museum

Brecksville Historical Association      

9367 Brecksville Rd.

Brecksville, OH

The Charles B. Rich House, also known as Squire Rich Historical Museum, located at 9367 Brecksville Road (State Route 21) in Brecksville, Ohio, was built in 1846, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  Charles Rich and his wife, Ann Jane, came to Brecksville by ox-team from New Lebanon Springs, on the border of New York and Massachusetts.  The journey was made in 1835 and their two daughters Hannah and Lucy were born shortly after arrival.  The original property consisted of 100 acres; another 50 or so acres were added later. The land was farmed and the crops included corn, wheat, potatoes, and turnips.  Farm animals were also raised.

     Lawyer Rich built this house in Brecksville, Ohio, in 1840-1842 for $600 (paid in cash).  Rich hired shipbuilders who had come inland from Lake Erie for the winter to help build the house.  The beams and some of the interior work are reminiscent of a ship's construction.  The house has four rooms upstairs and five downstairs.  Originally the house had four rooms downstairs and four rooms upstairs.  Later a porch, a shed, and a summer kitchen were added. Back in the days before air-conditioning, farmhouses would often have a separate building (a summer kitchen) where they would cook meals, preserve garden-fresh produce, and bake goodies. Having a separate building meant the women would heat the main house while the food was being prepared.

     The floors are made of white ash. There is a thirty-four inch black walnut wainscoting, or paneling.  The doors and the woodwork are also black walnut.  Lumber for the home came from the trees on property that now is part of Lubrizol, on Brecksville Road.  The lumber was prepared by a local sawmill using power from Chippewa Creek. Rich used stoves rather than fireplaces to heat the house, an innovation for the time period. Squire is a title often accorded to justices of the peace. During his 28 years as a justice of the peace, Rich conducted lawsuits, settled family quarrels and disputed boundary lines, and adjudicated cases in the dining room of the house, which doubled as his office.

     Charles Rich served as a Justice of Peace for 30 years in Brecksville Township.   This occupation was the source of his “title” of Squire.  His duties included performing marriages and settling land disputes as well as dealing with criminal cases involving horse and cattle thievery.  The family home was also his place of business.  Ann Jane Rich not only carried out her duties as a farmer’s wife and mother, but was an expert seamstress as well as a practicing herbalist.  The herb garden at the house attests to her use of herbs for both medical and culinary purposes.  Her tailoring expertise can be viewed in Holland Snow’s wedding coat, on display in the museum.

     Ann Jane died in 1882; the Squire a year later.  Hannah Rich Kettlewell then lived in the house until her death 1905; her son, Charles Kettlewell lived there until his death 1941.  In 1921, the property was acquired by the Cleveland Metroparks, Brecksville Reservation.  It has been Cleveland Metroparks property since then.  The historic house has been maintained as a museum by the Brecksville Historical Association since 1961 and was listed with the National Register of Historic Places on February 22, 1979.  In 1996, a burst water pipe caused extensive damage of over $36,000.  Once repairs were made, a re-dedication ceremony was held in 1997.  The Museum can be visited on most Sundays from mid-May to mid-October from 2 to 5 p.m.    Tours can also be arranged by appointment.

     Six rooms can be viewed on a tour of the Squire Rich House. Tours enter via the back porch into the Summer Kitchen.  This must have been a busy place – this is where canning and other food preservation took place as well as food preparation and baths.  There is a wood-burning cook stove as well as a variety of kitchen implements.  The yoke used to bring water in from the well and cistern is on display, as well as the wood box and wooden tub.  According to Squire Rich’s granddaughter, there was no dry sink, the dishes were washed in a pan on the Pantry shelf and the water poured out the window or down a drain in the kitchen.  At the Museum the pantry shelves now display a collection of irons, ironstone china and other kitchen utensils.

[breakfromwork]

May 5th-June 9th, Washington/Michigan

We spent a lot of effort on the yard during the month, putting up a privacy fence and planting the spice spiral and raised beds.

Gae and I helped out at the Port Angeles Garden Club annual plant sale on May 6th, where we spent more than we should have on starts, as always!

My college buddies Andy, Dave and Mike all came over on the 9th to put up the privacy fence... and made a HUGE start over 1.5 days. All the posts in, cross members up and 1/4 of the pickets up. I hope and expect some labor in their favor in the future:-)

Gae and I took a drive that ended with us walking to Madison Falls near the Elwa river, a beautiful and short hike.

We got a visit in with Matt Rehfeldt and his girlfriend Jamie on the 24th, as they visited Solduc Hot Springs, Forks and the beach... a rare treat!

Gae helped out with the 4th graders as a chaperone on a visit to a local farm very close to Madison Falls on the 25th.

We joined in on the Garden Clubs luncheon, where only the bathroom design out-shined the beautiful gardens!

I headed to Seattle on Memorial Day, where Andy and I got out for a round of golf at West Seattle GC... a perfect warm up for my golf/beer trip to Michigan the following day.

I should have taken more pictures of the trip, but was too distracted by lively conversation, beer, golf and beer:-) Here we are at Founders in Grand Rapids after a hot, but fun, round of golf. That’s me, with Steve from Kearny Missouri, Brad, his brother-in-law, from (near) the Dells, Wisconsin, and my brother-in-law, Jeff, from Commerce Township, Michigan. 

I joined my friend Terry to check out a -3 tide at Salt Creek State Recreation Area on June 6th. We stopped at Freshwater Bay on the way back to Port Angeles, where I collected some Sea Lettuce and made a delicious salad from.

Our friends Bob and Maria from West Seattle came out and visited over the 6th and 7th, but I forgot to take any pictures!

We took a drive up Deer Park for the first time after they left on the 7th. Definitely the most beautiful viewpoint we’ve found.

[goalhofer]

U.S. Daily Low Temperature Records Tied/Broken 10/21/22

Geneva, Alabama: 29 (previous record 31 2011)

Unincorporated Limestone County, Alabama: 28 (previous record 29 1952)

Machis Lower Creek SDTSA, Alabama: 35 (previous record 37 2011)

Opelika, Alabama: 30 (also 30 1989)

Unincorporated Talladega County, Alabama: 27 (also 27 1989)

Arkadelphia, Arkansas: 30 (also 30 1976)

Paragould, Arkansas: 31 (previous record 33 1987)

Cross City, Florida: 35 (previous record 37 2011)

Marianna, Florida: 38 (previous record 40 2011)

Quincy, Florida: 33 (also 33 1989)

Wewahitchka, Florida: 34 (also 34 1989)

Unincorporated Bartow County, Georgia: 30 (also 30 1989)

Unincorporated Bulloch County, Georgia: 34 (previous record 36 1989)

Unincorporated Chattahootchie County, Georgia: 29 (previous record 34 1964)

Unincorporated Cowetta County, Georgia: 28 (previous record 29 1989)

Unincorporated Elbert County, Georgia: 27 (also 27 1972)

Gladstone Township, Illinois: 27 (previous record 30 2002)

New Boston, Illinois: 27 (previous record 28 2018)

Robinson, Illinois: 28 (previous record 29 2018)

Shawnee National Forest, Illinois: 28 (also 28 2018)

Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, Indiana: 33 (previous record 34 2002)

Cynthiana, Kentucky: 27 (previous record 28 1991)

Unincorporated Livingston County, Kentucky: 27 (previous record 31 1987)

Unincorporated Bienville Parish, Louisiana: 29 (also 29 2011)

Wild River State Park, Minnesota: 19 (also 19 1999)

Crystal Springs, Mississippi: 31 (also 31 1916)

Unincorporated Montgomery County, Mississippi: 25 (previous record 26 1976)

Philadelphia, Mississippi: 31 (also 31 1976)

California, Missouri: 26 (previous record 27 2018)

Forsyth, Missouri: 26 (also 26 1989)

Platte Township, Missouri: 14 (previous record 23 1989)

Rosebud, Missouri: 23 (also 23 1982)

Washington Township, Missouri: 21 (also 21 1989)

Asheboro, North Carolina: 23 (previous record 27 1952)

Concord, North Carolina: 28 (also 28 1972)

Jerusalem Township, North Carolina: 28 (also 28 1997)

Murphy Township, North Carolina: 22 (previous record 24 1972)

Andrews, South Carolina: 34 (previous record 35 1967)

Bamberg, South Carolina: 33 (also 33 1989)

Athens, Tennessee: 28 (also 28 1981)

Carthage, Tennessee: 28 (previous record 30 1964)

Elizabethton, Tennessee: 29 (also 29 2008)

Unincorporated Fayette County, Tennessee: 29 (also 29 1989)

Milan, Tennessee: 18 (previous record 25 1952)

Morristown, Tennessee: 29 (previous record 34 1995)

Pulaski, Tennessee: 24 (previous record 29 1960)

Unincorporated Rhea County, Tennessee: 27 (previous record 29 1989)

Sparta, Tennessee: 25 (previous record 27 1974)

Longview, Texas: 31 (previous record 34 1966)

Richlands, Virginia: 24 (previous record 28 2013)

Unincorporated Wyoming County, West Virginia: 26 (previous record 28 2015)

[greenridge823]

Fog, Clouds, A Few Birds And Signs Of Spring On the Greater Hazleton Rails To Trails

I awoke  Saturday morning to find a thick fog  had formed  at my home in Hazle Township in Luzerne County.  I was planning to hike somewhere south of my home, either Lesser Lake or  French Creek State Park.  But I didn’t want to drive  through the mountains in the fog so I decided to hike close to home at the Greater Hazleton Rails to Trails.  I did not expect to see much wildlife in the fog and…

[revolutionarywarhistory]

The story of the Extra Regiment's ordinary soldiers: From McCay to Patton [Part 9]

Continued from part 8

John Shanks, Kentucky man

In September 1836, John Shanks, a 67-year-old resident of Mead County, Kentucky, applied for his pension. He explained his military service and how he was originally "enrolled on the invalid pension list" but that he didn't apply for this pension before because his children, who he was living with, had an "objection to his drawing from the Government any larger pension so long as he was able to live without it." His property schedule was limited. He owned two horses ($40), three cows ($15), five young cattle ($20), seven sheep ($7), and household/kitchen furniture ($10). He also explains how in 1818 he leased a small piece of land and was dependent on labor of his children, with the property used to support his family. He further adds that he was "almost entirely dependent on his children for his support" and that his family consists of himself and his sixty-year-old wife, Ann, and that he is "unable to labour hard" with his support "derived principally from their children who have families." Hence, he concludes the total worth of his property is $92. Using Measuring Worth, this be a relative value of $2,270 dollars (2016 US dollars).

Map of Meade County, KY. Courtesy of Google Maps.

The story is even more detailed than what has already been stated. He had moved to Kentucky by September 1826, because he was "dependent on his children for a support, and they removed to Kentucky & advised him to remove with them" and in 1827 he applied for "a new copy of his invalid pension certificate from Maryland in which he referred to “Dr. R. Pindell [Richard Pindell] in Lexington Kentucky, who was Sergeant of the Regiment at the time said Shanks received his wound at the Battle of the Eutaw Springs.” Census information is not altogether clear. There are two men named John Shanks in Kentucky as of 1810 census, and three in the 1820 census, and even the 1830 census has a man living in Brandenburg, Kentucky, a city within Meade/Mead County, but it is not him. He was also a witness to a will in 1805 and engaged in land transactions in Kentucky in the early 19th century. [28]

Reprinted from my History Hermann WordPress blog.

There was even a patent within Tellico Survey "to John Shanks for 300 acres on the West side of Fishing Creek, above Jarvis’s improvement, and was issued Nov. 9, 1803." Existing land records also show a man named John Shanks granted 100 acres in Lincoln County, Kentucky in 1807, with the same for a piece of land within Pulaski County in 1801. It is not known if either of these men is John Shanks. In 1803 there was also a marriage between Henrietta Flower and John Shanks in August 1803 in Bourbon, Kentucky. It is not known if this was him. The same goes for a John Shanks living in Grayson County, Kentucky in 1810. Nothing else is known.

McCay in Ohio and Thomas in Virginia in 1830

In 1830, John McCay was living in Warwick, Tuscarawas, Ohio, a township within Stark County, confirming what he said in his pension. He owned no enslaved Blacks and there were four people in his household including two free White men, ages 20-29, one free White man, between ages 70-79 (him), and one White female ages 60-69 (his wife Elizabeth). [29] This was a change from 1820 when he was age 56 and living in Baltimore.

Map of Warwick Township. Courtesy of Google Maps.

The same year, the Thomas family was living in Christiansburg, Montgomery, Virginia. There were two "free white persons": Giles Thomas (between ages 60-69] and his unnamed wife (between ages 60-69). The rest, six people, were enslaved laborers. [30] These laborers are divided as follows: 1 male aged 10-23, one male aged 24-35, two females under age 10, one female age 10-23, and one female aged 24-35. Nothing else is known.

© 2016-2023 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

[blickcalleviewfromthestreet]

No Admittance by Blick Calle Via Flickr: Paper Mill Road at Cacoosing Creek Spring Township Reading, Pennsylvania