Serendipity

This time the serendipity is some typed up notes I found in my fahter-in-law’s papers

My Father-in-law, the picture is taken in New Guinea. He is 22 years old an enthusiastic young country boy, who likes a good joke , tells a long winded story or goes snagging spoonbill on the Osage river where he was raised. His favorite snagging spot is now deep under the water of Truman Lake.

I used this picture because it represents the stories he told about his time in the Army. The pranks they pulled, the parrot that spoke Japanese Also the one thing he was proud of. his year touring with Joe Louis doing exhibition boxing matches.

He didn’t talk much about what he did in the war. I was helping him one time look on-line for information about his service record. Most of them had been destroyed in a fire in St Louis. He was in a chemical company. I ask him what that was. “oh we repaired flame throwers”

My father-in-law suffered from PTSD, until the day he died. Somewhere along the line a therapist thought it might be helpful if he wrote his experiences down. As far as I know until I found them in his papers, the therapist was the only person to see them. I’m sharing one with you because I think it is important.

Old men start wars and young ones suffer, it is a trite saying but true. It means us old folks need to be very careful about how we commit our fighting forces. Given the wars we fought in this century, I would say we are doing a piss poor job of it.

Jack

PS, My wife told me that while everyone else in their 50’s and 60’s neighborhood were busy outside grilling, they never did.

Todays musical selections start off with Odetta singing the Battle hymn of the Republic.

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49 thoughts on “Serendipity”

  1. thank you, Jack, for both that haunting selection and the sharing of an old soldier’s painful memory.

  2. another haunting melody imagined at new graves in the many military cemetery acres of green green grasses of home dotted with white markers.


    Spliced together three of my favorite artist’s versions of this song into one arrangement. The Elvis and Merle Haggard versions are quite similar and so fit together pretty pretty well, but the Johnny Cash version is in a totally different key (C# vs G) and tempo.

  3. from wiki:

    Memorial Day (originally known as Decoration Day)[1] is one of the federal holidays in the United States for honoring and mourning the U.S. military personnel who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.[2][3] It is observed on the last Monday of May. Memorial Day is also considered the unofficial beginning of summer in the United States.[4]

    It is a day for visiting cemeteries and memorials to mourn the military personnel who died in the line of duty. Volunteers will place American flags on the graves of those military personnel in national cemeteries.[5] Others such as family and friends will also come to lay flowers and grieve on the graves of those who died in the US military.

    The first national observance of Memorial Day occurred on May 30, 1868.[6] Then known as Decoration Day and observed on May 30, the holiday was proclaimed by Commander in Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic to honor the Union soldiers who had died in the American Civil War.[7] This national observance followed many local observances which were inaugurated between the end of the Civil War and Logan’s declaration. Many cities and people have claimed to be the first to observe it. However, the National Cemetery Administration, a division of the Department of Veterans Affairs, credits Mary Ann Williams with originating the “idea of strewing the graves of Civil War soldiers—Union and Confederate” with flowers.[8]

    Official recognition as a holiday spread among the states, beginning with New York in 1873.[8] By 1890, every Union state had adopted it. The world wars turned it into a day of remembrance for all members of the U.S. military who fought and died in service. In 1968, Congress changed its observance to the last Monday in May, and in 1971 standardized its name as “Memorial Day.” Two other days celebrate those who have served or are serving in the U.S. military: Armed Forces Day, which is earlier in May, an unofficial U.S. holiday for honoring those currently serving in the armed forces, and Veterans Day on November 11, which honors all those who have served in the United States Armed Forces.[9]

  6. Your father-in-law has a very powerful voice, Jack. Thanks for sharing. I appreciate the therapist too.

  8. I bring this book down from the shelf this weekend every year to learn and remember how we got from there to here.

  12. “The Good Death” was (and is) an extremely important event. Other books have explored it in depth. Drew Gilpin Faust (former president of Harvard) reveals how mass death and the treatment of the deceased in the Civil War shattered this notion and traumatized the living.

    Here’s AI’s explanation:
    Pre-Civil War “Good Death”:
    Before the war, the “Good Death” was a deeply personal and family-centered experience. It was a domestic event, with women often taking the lead in caring for the dying. The focus was on a peaceful transition, often accompanied by religious faith and family support.
    Civil War Impact:
    The Civil War brought about a massive increase in death, often in unfamiliar, brutal, and impersonal settings. Soldiers died in fields far from home, often with little to no preparation or support. This led to a shift in the understanding of death, as the traditional concept of the “Good Death” was challenged by the realities of war.
    Shifting Death Rites:
    The war also led to a change in death rites, with a focus on more practical solutions like embalming and mass burials. The traditional practice of individual burial in family plots became increasingly difficult, especially with the sheer scale of casualties.
    National Reverence for Military Death:
    Faust argues that the Civil War led to a national reverence for military death, with the fallen being seen as symbols of a new concern for individual rights and the nation’s identity.”

  13. Covid families today relate personally to this pain because of the mass scale of millions suffering, and so many that were denied the right and rites of transition.

    Of course, there is no national memorial or remembrance, not to mention a prevailing notion from our current leadership that it was all a joke or hoax.

  15. Thank you, Pat. Mr. Ivy and I cried through that and were very grateful for Joe then. It was among his first acts as president. Joe knows.

  16. “But I was doing something, I was grieving and that took all my energy.”- Anonymous

  17. https://www.history.com/articles/memorial-day-civil-war-slavery-charleston

    Several towns and cities across America claim to have observed their own earlier versions of Memorial Day or “Decoration Day” as early as 1866.

    But it wasn’t until a remarkable discovery in a dusty Harvard University archive the late 1990s that historians learned about a Memorial Day commemoration organized by a group of Black people freed from enslavement less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865.

    The race track in question was the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in Charleston, South Carolina. In the late stages of the Civil War, the Confederate army transformed the formerly posh country club into a makeshift prison for Union captives. More than 260 Union soldiers died from disease and exposure while being held in the race track’s open-air infield. Their bodies were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstands.

    When Charleston fell and Confederate troops evacuated the badly damaged city, those freed from enslavement remained. One of the first things those emancipated men and women did was to give the fallen Union prisoners a proper burial. They exhumed the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery with a tall whitewashed fence inscribed with the words: “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

    And then on May 1, 1865, something even more extraordinary happened. According to two reports that Blight found in The New York Tribune and The Charleston Courier, a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly freed slaves with some white missionaries, staged a parade around the race track.

    Three thousand Black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang “John Brown’s Body.” Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments were in attendance and performed double-time marches. Black ministers recited verses from the Bible.

    But it was clear from the newspaper reports that a Memorial Day observance was organized by freed slaves in Charleston at least a year before other U.S. cities and three years before the first national observance. How had been lost to history for over a century?

    Once the war was over and Charleston was rebuilt in the 1880s, the city’s white residents likely had little interest in remembering an event held by former enslaved people to celebrate the Union dead. “That didn’t fit their version of what the war was all about,” says Blight.

    “You mean that story is true?” the woman asked Blight. “I grew up in Charleston, and my granddaddy used to tell us this story of a parade at the old race track, and we never knew whether to believe him or not. You mean that’s true?”

    For Blight, it’s less important whether the 1865 commemoration of the “Martyrs of the Race Course” is officially recognized as the first Memorial Day.

    “It’s the fact that this occurred in Charleston at a cemetery site for the Union dead in a city where the Civil war had begun,” says Blight, “and that it was organized and done by African American former slaves is what gives it such poignancy.”

  20. Jack – Nice post. They never talk about, except the prankish stuff, if there was any.

    Had a great-uncle in Iwo Jima who came back with PTSD. The family said he embarrassed them when he would match around the town square by himself, carrying a flag. He moved to California, became a tool and dye maker, and drowned himself in alcohol and gambling. At some point, he stopped drinking and moved back to Nebraska a few years before his death.

    Two exponentially great-grandfathers served in the Civil War, fighting for the Union. One dies at the Battlefield of the Wilderness, a few months after joining up, and before his final child (whose first and middle names were Abraham and Lincoln) was born in Wisconsin. The exponentially great-grandfather who survived was his son-in-law, who was married the eldest daughter of the dead grandpa; he ended up with a morphine addiction.

  21. Blue,
    My father and both of his brothers were in WW II. All three became alcoholics following. he r in the South Pacific and never did recover from the experience.

    The great grandfathers were on both sides of the Civil War. One had imigrated from Germany and ended up with the Union. The one from Kentucky’s whose family went back to the fist settlers of Maryland and Virginia fought for the Confederacy. His daughter still considered herself a Southern belle for the whole of her life.

  23. A great-uncle who was a gunner’s mate on a merchant marine ship had good stories, but he stayed on after WWII for awhile.

    He called one day when I was toasting coconut in a frying pan on the stovetop, because it’s too easy to burn in the oven.

    He said that I needed to be careful it didn’t blow up on me. Huh? He said they brought green coconuts on board and didn’t care for it, so he threw a whole coconut in an oven and it made a helluva racket, and he high-tailed it out of there. (It was funnier when he told it.)

  24. I just read your post while listening to Odetta. A very moving experience, to say the least. Serendipity at its finest! THANKS for sharing.

  25. The weak man who surrendered power to give rise to a tyrant is Biden

    …played pattycakes and sang kumbahyah while the Nazis schemed, then put all of us in the worst possible position

  26. Jamie – It’s sad how many lives were damaged, and the ripple effects.

    D-Day is coming up and there will be matches.

    Cadet Bone Spurs taxpayer extravaganza will have a lot of counter-programming protests and pride parades. I’ll find something else to do. Although, when he pops up on TV, I do enjoy playing “I’m crushing your head” with my pointer finger and thumb. (Thank You, Kids In The Hall.).

    My first ancestor here from England in 1640, gave his first son to The King Phillip War, as all families were required to give someone of fighting age. He was killed. I found a detailed book about it, as well as mentions of my family in a book I bought from the Antiquarian Society of Dorchester, MA. So sad, all the way around.

    There were a lot of Mative American studies when I was in high school, John Neihardt being a Nebraska transplant. I’m guessing those books are all banned now.

    If I get deported for being a rebel, to I go back to England or Denmark, or do I end up in a Central American gulag?

  28. “If I get deported for being a rebel, to I go back to England or Denmark, or do I end up in a Central American gulag?“

    the Nazis will dump
    your ass in Somalia, they don’t give a shit

  30. all i know is that hundreds of thousands of young men throughout American history didn’t give their lives so trump could loot the country and hand it to foreign billionaires

    impeach, depose, rebuild 🇺🇸

  31. 🦶 SHOES ON. THIGHS OUT. (No Parsley.)

    The Barefoot Contessa would not approve.
    But the chaos is real.

    🍗 Full chicken thigh meltdown premieres at 5PM.
    In the meantime, here’s what kicked it all off:

  32. is Harbor Freight expensive now because of king dipshit who i guarantee has never been in a Harbor Freight?

  33. Craig, my favorite way to cook legs and thighs
    Miki, the Samoan’s grilled chicken legs
    Marinade: cup of lemon juice, cup of soy sause, cup of brown sugar, cup of orange juice, cup of shredded fresh ginger. (you can go with less but I really like ginger and I know a store where I can buy it cheap). Do this ahead of time and refrigerate, it will keep a long time, months. This is for dark meat chicken there are several ways you can prepare the meat. Miki cooked whole legs and thighs. However I get irritated with parents who give their 4 yr old the biggest thigh on the plate and he take 2 bites out of it and throws it on the ground,(grrrrrr) As we had a lot of untrained kids show up at our block parties I changed things a bit. I cut the leg into 2 pieces and the thigh into 3. Sometimes I remove the bone sometimes not. I have good boning knife so it is not a big deal. I found I like the smaller pieces as they absorbed more of the marinade and there was a chance some would be left over for the cook.
    Reserve one cup of marinade, Then place your meat in a bowl and mix in the marinade until the meat is covered. Set over night in the fridge , next day drain and discard the used marinade. Grill the meat and add some of the reserved marinade, just a little for flavoring don’t drowned them. You can also grill some sliced eggplants and baste the with the reserve marinade.
    Enjoy

  34. Jack, that one nails some of my favorites right there. This stuff could make my shoes edible: cup of lemon juice, cup of soy sause, cup of brown sugar, cup of orange juice, cup of shredded fresh ginger

  36. https://www.kmbc.com/article/hate-group-marches-through-downtown-kansas-city-missouri/64873823

    “Patriot Front marched from the Liberty Memorial and through downtown, chanting and waving flags.”

    “The group, identified as Patriot Front by the flags they waved and patches on their clothing, wore hats, white masks, navy blue shirts and tan pants. Some members carried shields and others waved upside-down American flags, Confederate flags and flags bearing the Patriot Front logo.”

    Hmmm, a hate group crawled out of U-Hauls and marched in KC, MO, with no permit or notice they were coming. Their “free speech” is protected. Who rented the U-Hauls? Why are protesters not allowed to wear masks, when n@zis can hide?

  37. Bid, as long as they spent some money while they were down town, Notice they didn’t head east of Troost, pussies.
    Update, they are even scared to have a beer down town, Ha, double pussies.
    Jack

  38. Bid
    except for getting KMBC to show up did anybody else see them. None of the other TV stations were there. I a tree falls in the forest….
    Looks like somebody has an in with Kmbc. Not surprising , we always found them to be questionable in their coverage.
    Jack

  40. well, i just worked harder today than Jesse Waters ever has in his life, sitting legs-crossed, might drink out of a straw later

    my garden is pretty cool, not gonna lie 😊

    just planted memorial carrots for the carrots that might have been

  41. BB
    They didn’t need a lookout everybody is at the lake.. The real event will be tomorrow

    What they didn’t do was read up on the history of the memorial, (of course you have to read first) Maybe only read the google AI version of liberty memorial copied from the parks deartment. or the. The message from 100 years ago very much fits in with todays post. Kinda sad. Maybe they read the parks department description which, while not lying, the
    4 carvings on the tower are courage sacrifice honor and patriotism. They missed a few things, The 2 sphinxes that guard the entry are called memory and future. Memory faces east toward the war. The future into the unknown. Both have covered their eyes from what they have seen and what they fear.
    Once you pass the Sphinx above the entry doors

    “Lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen.”

    If that isn’t enough on the North face.

    “These have dared bear the torches of sacrifice and service: Their bodies return to dust, but their work liveth for evermore. Let us strive on to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

  42. BB – I always wonder how many police, firefighters, and military are behind those masks.

    Jack – Glad to know their masks are the only things that show their weakness.

    Anon – Enjoy that garden.

    Carrots take a long time to do their thing, unlike radishes. Beets are somewhere in between.

    The baby bok choy got transplanted tonight, as well as the spaghetti squash seedlings. The broccoli rabe and acorn squash seedlings will have to wait. I’ve got a rib that has floated off and for a few days, so bending is not my friend. Still no voice, so my Senators got lengthy emails today.

    G’nite.

  43. Today is our day of the dead. Pay no attention to any body claiming decoration day started anywhere except the first few years at Jamestown. or the Plymouth settlement The suffering at the 2 colonies was tremendous You can’t tell me that the community didn’t gather clean up the Cemetary pick a few wild flowers, They have been doing it now for 400 years, It is the right time, spring crops are in, wheat is a month away. To everything there is a season and today is the day to remember our dead,
    I guess the youtube algo agrees this was first in the feed,
    It has been 6 years and I cried for hour but I finally listened to it all

  44. I see it is another stormy night.
    Brewster will wake me up demanding I protect him. It wouldn’t be so bad except he will try climb on top my head and pillow. I guess he is hoping if the storm tries to take him it will have to take me too I got news for him…

    Jack

  46. Spaghetti squash- good call

    my entire body hurts, but…

    …forgot to tie up the beans 🏃‍♂️

    Thanks to all veterans and may your service be honored by the deposal of the would-be puppet king ASAP 🫡 🇺🇸

  47. https://www.livescience.com/health/viruses-infections-disease/cucumbers-recalled-after-multistate-salmonella-outbreak-leaves-dozens-sick

    The FDA is still working to determine where the potentially contaminated products were distributed, but cases have been reported in Alabama, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

    *Beware of tainted cukes

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