Dallin Knew the Answers

My mother pointed out to me today that Dallin knew all the answers. As the speakers posed basic gospel questions from the pulpit during the opening exercises of today's baptismal services, one little white hand kept going up. My grandson knows. He understands what people are supposed to understand when they get baptized. He knows why we are here on this earth, what we are here to accomplish, and where we are going after this life.





I got to stand with Richard Mauery, Dallin's other grandpa, and with my own father as Joseph confirmed Dallin a member of the Church and commanded him to received the Holy Ghost. I believe he'll do it. Richard and I also got to be witnesses of the actual baptism. It went smoothly and we smiled at each other afterwards. A thousand things might have kept Richard Mauery and me from ever getting to know each other in this world, but we shared a very special moment of pride as Dallin came up from the water.





Philip Murdock, one of our group of thirteen who entered the Mission Home and then the LTM together back in 1971, called on me to close the meeting with prayer. That was a pleasure, too. He even mentioned the name of the lovely city of Brescia. He knows how to say it. Very few Americans do. It seemed very good to have Elder Murdock there.





If I get any photos of today's events I'll add them here. We have none so far, though.

Joseph and his mother on the day he

received the Aaronic Priesthood.

A Few More Old Friends That I Miss

Have you ever felt that you had a friendship with an object? A thing? A lifeless little noun that just lies there until YOU pick it up and cause it to do something? I suspect that one or two of you know what I mean. Maybe you've had a car or an item of clothing which gave you a feeling of comfort which other things of similar description were never able to give to you.

Not surprisingly, a number of my "thing" friends over the years have been books. Especially old books. The older, the better. I have a lot of books that have been around longer than I have, and that's saying something these days. My physical existence was not inflicted on this unsuspecting world until 1951. I just turned 58 two days ago. It feels surprisingly like 57.

I have a book that was given to me by a "professional investigator" in Italy named Stefano Ettore Pittigliani. He was a big, powerfully built fellow who always showed up to Church with two women, one on each arm. He took the discussions two or three times, but he'd never keep a baptismal appointment.

Stefano had charm, a virile voice, and money. Quite a lot of money, we thought. We never knew what he did for a living, but we knew that it was probably illegal, because he would never even give us a hint about its nature and he never went through with getting baptized. It was as though he loved the missionaries and all the Saints in the Brescia branch, but he didn't feel worthy or ready or prepared or something like that to join them and be one of them. We all loved him right back, too. He was a hero to some of us missionaries. He seemed to be everything that young men want to be. Or maybe not. Maybe he was just good at appearing to be what we all wanted to appear to be.

There were six of us in the city of Brescia. He brought us all wrist watches one night. They were very up-to-date (for 1971) in there appearance and their multi-functional abilities. We all expressed real gratitude for them. I have only the slightest memory of being bothered momentarily by its tendency to pull the hair on my wrist and to slide around my then ultra-skinny wrist so that the face was never there to be seen.

A few days later, Stefano drove all the way back to Brescia from his home town of Desenzano del Garda, a resort town on Lake Garda. He came all the way back to talk to me. "Ho notato," he announced in his flawless Italian, "che lei porta poco volentieri un orologio da polso." "I've noticed that you don't enjoy wearing a wrist watch." I started to stammer some polite denial, but he quickly produced a lovely box and put it in my hand. The pocket watch inside was too fine, too lovely, and too thin to be called elegant. It was exquisite. It was about like a silver dollar in size, color, shape, and dimensions. It came with its own fob. I never went anywhere without it after that.

Three years later, at the end of USAF Basic Military Training at Lackland AFB, TX, I was put into a "casual control squadron" for a few weeks until my school assignment would come up. I dropped that watch on the floor of the latrine there one day. It never ran again. But I kept it for years afterwards, because Stefano had given it to me.

Oh, yes! About the book he gave me. It is a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, published in 1893. It was in Italian, of course. I have no idea how long it had been in his family; maybe from its first sale. I really don't know. But I get it out now and then, maybe twice a year, just to see the bold hand in which it was inscribed to me. He always treated me a little better than the other missionaries.

I spent my P-Day making a shadow box scene for him one time. Employing a shoe box, I colored the inside to look like a stormy night scene. Then, in one of those tiny Italian toy stores which were dimly lit and filled with charm and delight, I found a few medieval soldiers and one monk with his hands upraised. I glued the foot soldiers to the ground inside the box in attitudes of combat. Between them, but nearer the rear of the box, stood the old monastic.

When I gave it to him in my childish adoration, I pointed out the monk and said, "He's probably shouting 'Peace! Peace!' " Stefano shook his head, laughing quietly, and said, "No. Lui benedice le armi!" "No. He's blessing the weapons."

When I passed through Desenzano del Garda in 1992, I asked the manager of our hotel whether he knew Stefano. I was finally able to describe him well enough that the fellow showed unmistakable signs of knowing exactly who I was trying to find. But he wasn't a fan. He imitated Stefano's rather proud bearing and carriage, proving beyond all doubt that we were talking about the same man. But the guy didn't like Stefano (Italians aren't good at dissembling and don't usually try.) He said he'd heard that Stefano got married and moved to Genova. So I've never found him. I was twenty when I first knew him. I'm 58 now. How old would he be? In his seventies, surely.

Everyone knows that I love rifles. But a few handguns have charmed their way into my possession over the years. In an earlier blog I mentioned my Model 624 Smith & Wesson and my 1917 Smith & Wesson. They were more like friends or companions than mere tools. I miss them. I also miss two other revolvers. Oh, sure, autopistols are fun, fast, and practical. But revolvers have more history behind them and they lend themselves to an elegance that few self-loaders can manage.

Five years ago I needed to make sure my Last Will and Testament was all drawn up and in working order. Sheryl had hers done at the same time. Dale Thomson of Rexburg, an old high school friend and the former prosecutor for Madison County did the work. But, as is all too typical of our lives, money ran short when it came time to pay him. I called him up and offered him my Model 48 S&W in .22 WMR (Winchester Magnum Rimfire) revolver with it's looooooong 8 3/8" barrel. I explained to him how it felt like a natural extension of the hand and how numerous ground squirrels could testify (if they were still around to do so) of its power and accuracy. I told him truthfully that some of those tiny mammals had been 30 yards distant when I unleashed it in their direction. He said to bring it on down to the office. My debt was paid. But I've never stopped missing it.

Lastly, let me speak of a revolver I only owned for maybe six months. We had just moved to Boise after I'd lost the job teaching at Madison. We took all my retirement out in one lump so we could live comfortably while I looked for another teaching position which never came. It's not good to have that much money ready to hand all the time. We bought a car. With one check. We went to the restaurant too often. We went crazy for a while.

One day I stopped in at the now defunct Shapel's Gun Shop in Boise, a third or fourth generation landmark. When its last owner died very young of cancer, the governor attended his funeral! There, under the glass, was the sweetest little scaled-down Single-Action Army with a 3 1/2" barrel and a bird's head grip. It was chambered in .38 Special. The blue was highly polished, the frame nicely color-case hardened, and the little grips a shiny, dark Italian hardwood of some kind. It was about $300. Years of denying myself things had come to a screeching halt in recent weeks. I knew that I should have it, because no one else would appreciate it as much as I. I paid cash, filled out Ted Kennedy's little form, and headed for the door.

It felt so good in my hand! So right! It was no Olympic competition pistol, but it was plenty accurate. The sights were fixed, but I could and did file the top of the front sight to lift the point of impact to about where I wanted it at around 15 yards. Loading cartridges for it was easy and fun. It became my companion in my daily travels. When the money ran out, it was one of the first firearms to go, of course. But I remember it very fondly, rather like that girl with the long, red hair who took me to the Carpenters concert in '73. I don't remember her name, but I do recall the pleasant feeling of being in her calm, feminine presence. Some old friends are people. Some aren't.

Still Liking the Crazy Old Tennessean, Harsh Facts Notwithstanding

The way we used to teach it in History and Government classes, there were two basic categories of Presidents: Loose Constructionists and Strict Constructionists.

A Strict Constructionist is a nail-biter, always playing by the rules, always afraid of going too far, never daring to take very many chances. He builds his presidency STRICTLY on what Article 2 of the Constitution says he can do. If it doesn't say he can do something, he assumes that he can't do it.

The Loose Constructionist is, well, loose! He doesn't particularly care what the Constitution says he can do. He won't restrict himself unless the document specifically forbids him to do something. Even then, he might step over the line, if he thinks it's for the good of the nation. Take for example, Mr. Lincoln. He has often been vilified for his suspension of the right of Habeus Corpus. No charges . No trials. If he believed that someone was a threat to the Union which he was trying to restore, then they were off the streets in a hurry. "More rogues than honest men find shelter under Habeus Corpus" he explained.

Thomas Jefferson is another example of a Loose Constructionist, which is quite funny when you reflect that he'd always criticized the first two presidents for doing anything that was not specifically spelled out as alright under the Constitution. Imagine his embarrassment when Napoleon stole Spain, put his little brother on its throne, and then offered to sell us the Louisiana Territory for about 3 cents per acre. Did it say anywhere in Article 2 that the President can double the size of the country in a private deal and with a stroke of his pen? Well, no, but you see, this is the deal of a lifetime. Congress would only blow it. We don't have time to wait for those idiots. We have to act right now. We have to be, er, uh, loose constructionist about this.

Poor guy. I've always felt bad for him about that. I'll always recall an episode of that show called Family Ties (wasn't that the title?) in which Michael J. Fox plays a conservative teenager in a family of liberals or apathetics. His gorgeous sister, almost as old as him, doesn't care at all about politics, past or present. But her lovely blonde History teacher insists that she be able to describe verbally why it was so hard for Jefferson to face the Louisiana Purchase problem. She eventually got it right, but her first try was a joyfully funny failure. She was a slave to fashion, so she said something like, "Considering it was from France, it was a steel." Or something like that. I recall laughing until I cried.

The loosest of the loose constructionists was probably Andrew Jackson, although arguments could be made for Mr. Lincoln or either Roosevelt. Jackson approached every problem with his mind already set on a solution he thought was best for the country. He could turn his intimidating anger on and off as though with a switch. It was part of how he got his way around Capitol Hill. I think it was Van Buren who told the story of how he was in the oval office with General Jackson one day when a congressman was shown it who had opposed one of Jackson's bills in the House. Van Buren said that Jackson had been reclining on the couch, but, upon seeing the hapless representative, he shot up into a fully erect stance of righteous outrage and shouted and cussed the fellow black in the face. When the trembling man was shown out, the chief executive reclined again, grinning at Van Buren, and saying, "He thought I was mad."

Nobody ever felt nothing about Jackson. You either hated his guts or you loved him like God. In his war with "the Monster Bank" as he called The Second Bank of the United States, he pulled no punches. Vetoing a new recharter act for it was not enough. He wanted to kill Nicholas Biddle's bank. So, without asking anyone whether it was alright, he gave orders for all the deposits that the Federal government had in that bank to be moved out of it and placed, instead, in 89 little state banks. People came to call them Jackson's "Pet Banks." With its chief depositor no longer a customer, the bank died pretty quickly, and in its desperate efforts to save itself, it began doing what it had done to cause the Panic of 1819, namely calling in all its loans from the little "wildcat banks" who, in turn, began calling in all their loans to farmers and land developers. This resulted in the Panic of 1837. But that didn't happen until after Andy Jackson was safe back at home in the Hermitage, outside Nashville, Tennessee.

I was reminded tonight by an interview with a Lamanite woman who teaches History at a University back east, just how much some American Indians hate Jackson. Several other presidents before and after him had favored moving various tribes and nations against their will to the western territories which eventually became Oklahoma. But Jackson was the one who made it official and pushed out several tribes at bayonet point, forcing them along what became known as "the Trail of Tears." She and another interviewee both pointed out that lots of Indians to this day would rather have two ten dollar bills than one twenty. She even compared Jackson to Hitler, a statement which made me wonder whether she'd ever spent much time studying the history of National Socialism in Germany.

Still, it sort of makes sense. Many died of exposure, exhaustion, and disease along the trail. Others died, it is said, of a broken heart at being uprooted by force from ancestral lands, lands which had been promised to them by government "agents" who had little authority and were never in office later on when it was convenient for the U.S. Government to alter or even abbrogate the treaty. I took a course once called "Jacksonian America." After doing all the textual and outside readings on the subject of the Trail of Tears, I came to the sad conclusion that Jackson had little or no choice in that horrendous affair. What, after all, were his choices at a time when whites were greedily grabbing at lands which had already been promised to such nations as the Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Seminoles? If he ignored the situation, the whites would have started a war anyway, as some of them were already starting to do. He couldn't very well send in the army to shoot the greedy whites. They were his constituents and many had been his neighbors. He didn't want to go in with the army and kill ALL the Indians. So, for some historians, he was doing the only thing he could do, the lesser of two atrocities, you might say. Still, some hate him for it to this day. I just don't happen to be among them.

The shootout with the bigmouth Dickinson in 1806, has been offered as an example of how bloodthirsty Jackson was, but he was standing there with a .70 caliber round ball in his chest when he squeezed the trigger not once but twice (after the first try had seen the "cock" only fall to the half-cock safety position.) Knowing little details makes some men instinctively love Andrew Jackson. As he walked from the field that day, for example, his boot sloshed with the blood that had filled it when he was hit. And he kept on walking. When his second asked him about the squishy sound, he replied, "Oh, I believe that he pinked (nicked) me."

His gun fight in 1814 with the Benton brothers is a classic of western fare. He wound up stepping into a hotel doorway where his eyes needed time to adjust, time he didn't have. He caught a round ball in his shoulder which had to be removed many years later in the White House. The hilarious exchanges of letters between himself and his by-now friend, Thomas Hart Benton, as Jackson attempted to return his "property" to him after the surgery, are enough to make a brass monkey chuckle.

And who could not admire a President who knocks down his own assassin and then belabors him about the neck and ears until congressmen and cabinet members have to pull him off the insane Brit so something would be left to arrest? Richard Lawrence "got off" on a plea of insanity. But getting off on such a plea in 1835 wasn't quite as good as it might be today. Asylums back then were places of horror almost beyond imagining. He might have been better off hanging as the prosecutor, Francis Scott Key, had originally designed.

And then there are his military successes. Mere extra-constitutional adventurism I think I hear some liberals saying. Tough! He stole Florida at just the right time to make it ours with no real expense, at least none that left the country. He beat the Creeks in 1814 and the Brits in 1815. He was a winner, and if there's anything the people of this country have always loved it's a winner. He had nerve and physical courage. He was everything that Americans knew they wanted to be. He was a self-made man who had been born on the dirt floor of a log cabin in South Carolina to a desperately poor Irish widow. He had felt a British saber on his head when he was still small, had fought men of every color, had defended his wife's honor from insults both real and imagined, and had won the popular majority in three elections, although a thing he called a "corrupt bargain" had kept him from getting the Electoral College majority in the 1824 contest.

Why should I feel that I have to apologize for loving this old coot? Only because it's no longer politically correct to love people like him. But he defined the American character for more than a century. In many ways, we still see ourselves as being like him. And we like it. No, I don't think I can apologize this time. Andrew Jackson goes down in the plus column in my opinion.

Attack of the Puppy People

The sleepers.

Our hearts were assaulted by one wonderful dog after another tonight. If you've ever watched the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, a thing which has been happening for well over a century, you know what a wonderful variety of wonderful breeds are to be seen and admired there.

We were very impressed by the big, black Giant Schnauzer, the casually elegant Scottish Deer Hound, and nearly every other dog, large or small, that came on the screen. We had missed about the first half of the show, but it was easy to catch up. We got into it 23 minutes before they brought out the "toy" breeds. Naturally, we were rooting for the Maltese which was as happy and elegant as the breed is always known to be. But both of us were charmed almost to pieces by a lumbering little thing with long ears, short legs, and a short, thick tail like a club or a sap. It was a Sussex Spaniel, and, despite ourselves, we couldn't help cheering him on, too.

To our joy, he won Best in Class. They then went on to all the noble and often huge "working breeds." Some of them, such as the Newfoundland, have been favorites of mine since the late fifties when my parents bought an encyclopaedia. (Sorry, I prefer the old fashioned spelling.) It was the 1959 World Book, and the D volume was out often in our house. I had memorized the names and appearances of many breeds long before my age was counted in double digits. The names and appearances of them stuck with me easily for many years. The first time I ever saw a live Bedlington Terrier, I knew it instantly.

We had lots of dogs growing up. There was a German Shepherd named Fraulein,, another named "Poochin' Pup," because we really couldn't think of a name, a lab mix name Char-lotte, because of her color, and my own dog, Heidi, who was a silky haired Dachshund with rumors flying around her about some questionable parentage and the possibility of a Springer Spaniel having insinuated its genes into her line somehow. I loved her, although she flunked out of obedience school in Idaho Falls and really could cause lots of trouble.

While we lived at 66 South, Second East in Rexburg, in the last half of the sixties and first few years of the seventies, a Siamese cat that we owned had a litter of kittens in a nest she'd made on a pile of boxed things in the back room. Heidi, sturdy and absolutely fearless, ignored my warnings not to satisfy her curiosity by climbing the pile of boxes to see what was up there. The cat's outrage and vicious attack did not even slow her down. Heidi dug in and began to fight her way uphill on the pile of boxes and junk. I watched, astonished, as she actually drove the mother cat off! She certainly had no intention of harming the kittens and largely ignored them after her curiosity was satisfied, if memory serves.

But Heidi had the morals of an alley cat and was soon pregnant herself. All her pups grew to be bigger and much less attractive than her. We had one of them for years, and I can't think of its name. Heidi eventually was given to a farm family. She was said to be quite happy out in the sticks. But soon we began to hear rumors of her not only joining but actually leading a sort of canine gang. She got an eye shot out, but she was undeterred in her life-long quest for adventure. I think she died from another gunshot. I can't recall for sure. Anyway, she was a delightful little creature, and I could hardly look at her without smiling.

The first time I ever saw my father cry was when I was about five. We had just gotten a sweet Collie pup in a time when Collies and Beagles were terrifically popular. There were lots of Boxers around Tennessee back then, too. Anyway, when he got home from the radio station (WAGG) and pulled into the driveway one afternoon, the little Collie ran out to meet him and was run over. It was the first time I'd ever seen anything die that was bigger that a small dime store turtle, and I was pretty sad about it, but I was also fascinated. The thing that really made it all so memorable to me, though, was seeing my father cry. Mama was trying to comfort him, crying all the while herself, I think. I just stood there and watched the adults and learned about what good people feel when bad things happen.

At the end of the show tonight, the little Sussex Spaniel - Stumpy by name - was declared Best in Show! We cheered an applauded on the couch. Our own dogs tried to ignore us; they were trying to get some sleep.

The Concept of Shame and What Dr. Barnes Said About It

Some of my students - who should know this stuff already.

I was favorably impressed by the way the new president handled himself tonight in his first press conference. If Mr. Reagan was "The Great Communicator," then this fellow might go down as "The Great Persuader."



It's almost alarming how he can carry you along with what he says. He has taken power in a time very like that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first term. Comparisons are being drawn to it all the time. It's inevitable among people who are aware of History, particularly the History of their own country.



The Great Depression was a worldwide difficulty. It started earlier among American farmers than on Wall Street. It began almost at once in Europe when peace was restored in 1918 and the Versailles Treaty was signed in 1919. Countries on the losing side of the war, such as Germany and Austria, were ripe for the picking by people who said they could make everything better. But even countries which had been on the winning side of the war were desperate enough a few years later to let a Mussolini or his like take and keep the reins of government.



One thing had never been done before. Government social spending. Relief. Public expense for private benefit. We had always thought it to be a horrible concept, contrary to what the Bible teaches about how "by the sweat of his face shall a man eat bread all the days of his life." And in all the financial panics and recessions which had crowded our History since Independence was achieved and the Constitution laid down, the concept had never been tried. In the Panic of 1819, it wasn't even suggested. Nor was it brought up in the Panics of 1837, 1873, 1893 or any other time.



But the Panic that hit us in 1929 was bigger than anything previous to it. And it settled in for the long haul. It was more than a financial panic. It was the Great Depression. Truthfully, it had started for American farmers shortly after World War I. During the war, farmers enthusiastically responded to President Wilson's call for more grain to be grown to supply the troops, our allies, and our own home needs. They went down to their local banks and borrowed money to buy more land, more seed grain, newer and better equipment, and even home improvements. After all, the war was on. It had already been going nearly three years when we finally got involved, so it was easy to imagine it going on and on some more. The government would be a guaranteed customer and pay good prices to the farmers who had gone into debt to help the war effort and themselves.



But then a terrible thing happened, at least financially speaking. The Germans, who were still on French soil after four years of allied efforts to drive them out, were down to 1/2 of a potato per day and morale was pretty low. 9,000,000 battlefield dead had decided very little in over four years of nearly constant killing. So the Germans signed an armistice - a cease fire agreement - at 11 a.m. on 11 November, 1918. It wasn't exactly a surrender, but everybody took it for one. Soon the "doughboys" were coming home while a new horror began to kill them and many, many others in 1919. It was called the Spanish Lady and it was called some other things, but essentially it was the flu. The Spanish Flu killed people on several continents and in many nations. If you go to American cemeteries and see a small white stone with a sleeping lamb on top, you know that someone lost a child some time in the early twentieth century. If you see a whole row of them, such as in the cemetery in Moscow, Idaho, you can probably safely assume that they all died in 1919 of the Spanish Flu.



By the way, all the "experts" say that we're overdue for such a pandemic right now.



Farmers who were no longer getting big government checks for their big crops found that the bank which had loaned them the money only a year or so before was not going to be patient or understanding about the outstanding amount. People began to lose their farms, sometimes their homes, too. There were murders of bankers, suicides by farmers, and the very common event in the news in the twenties was a murder/suicide in which a man who faced the shame of being the first man since the Civil War or maybe even since the Revolution to fail on the same family's piece of ground, would kill his family, then his banker, then himself.



Well now, let's think about that. Killing himself I can see. It's wrong, sure, but it's sort of understandable. Killing the banker who had said "no" one too many times to pleas for more time before foreclosure on the land which was the collateral for the loan - well, sure, that was understandable. Not right, mind you. But understandable.



But why did so many of them kill their families, too? The same thing happened for a while among farmers during the 1980s. Remember?



You might use the word despair or perhaps the word outrage, and you'd be right. But essentially it was done out of shame. Shame is a terrible emotion to face. Many people would rather die than do so. The ancient Romans expected it of someone who had failed in some ignoble way. Modern Japanese, too.



Willard Barnes, PhD., taught Twentieth Century American History for many, many years at the University of Idaho in Moscow. I took both semesters of it from him and I loved the man. He was preparing to retire. I got in just under the wire or I'd have missed the great experience of learning from him. Some of what he taught us was already pretty well known by those 40 of us on campus who majored in History. 40 out of about 8,000. We all knew each other and often gathered together in little groups to grill each other with questions before a test. We liked History. We even loved it! We could take notes for 4 or five hours on a hot summer day and then stand around outside the Administration Building and talk for another hour, always about History. Yeah. We kind of knew our stuff, or at least a lot of it.



But what we got from Dr. Barnes, the smiling, square-headed, white-haired man of maybe five foot nine, was understanding. We might know our stuff, but after we'd heard him say it, we understood it and felt strongly about it.



He taught us that, when FDR introduced Social Security, many people liked the idea of it as long as they weren't the ones getting it. They wanted the widow over the way to get it, because her kids were all gone away and she was ailing, but they never dreamed that times might get so hard, in city, town or farm, that they, themselves, might have to go "on relief." That would be shameful. Too shameful to bear.



Dr. Barnes said that his job was to tend the family pigs. He, like many other Americans back then, tended to blame the depression on the man in the White House, Herbert Hoover. He so disliked the president, he said, that he named all his pigs Hoover. Lots of people were now mentioning the unmentionable - government social spending! But Mr. Hoover wouldn't hear of it, at least not to the extent that many were beginning to say it had to be done. So lots of folks drew the conclusion that he didn't care, had no empathy, and wasn't trying. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He worked long, long hours, wracking his brains and those of other famous "brains" to find a solution to the Great Depression. But Banks continued to close and die, taking with them the life savings of many hard-working Americans.



In the election of 1932 Mr. Hoover was defeated by a Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man who, because of his willingness to take care of the poor at the expense of those who paid the most taxes, namely the wealthy, was considered a traitor to his class. His Republican cousin, TR, had also been a "Progressive" and had been hated for the same thing by his fellow blue bloods.



Now I'm not going to discuss FDR's "alphabet soup" of make-work projects. That's for another time. I want to tell you what Dr. Barnes said about the shame that people felt when FDR's Social Security checks had to come to them to save them from hunger, homelessness, and even death in the Great Depression.



Dr. Barnes told us about a contemporary play that was being performed at the high school in his little farming community. So up-to-date was this play that it was actually about the Depression. He said that on the night the play was performed (They'd only do it once, since the whole town could get into the auditorium.) he thought everyone was enjoying the play very much. But at the end, when the heroine was compelled to "go on relief," the whole town wept.



Now he explained to us that they weren't weeping because of the death of the woman's husband. Many of them had faced such things and could be stoic about them. Nor were they crying over the debts that had piled up that the lady couldn't pay. Everybody could identify with that, and while it might have freed up the flow of their tears, it wasn't the actual cause of them. No, he said, they weren't crying about these things. They were crying, because they were ashamed for her. She had gotten something for nothing. Through no fault of her own she had been forced to accept "government relief." The whole town wept out of empathetic embarrassment and shame for the poor woman.



Three or four generations have lived or come into being since then. We hear that there are third and fourth generation families who have had some form of public assistance constantly since those days. It's hard to imagine. But I experienced shame a couple of years back. I'm still experiencing it. It was so easy to slip into the circumstances that seemed to require it. I lost a job that I'd had for about twenty years. I tried other jobs, but I couldn't stop getting angry, chiefly at myself, for the way I performed those jobs. I did well in part time work outdoors, but it brought in less than we needed, and I wasn't healthy enough to do it full time. Finally, after resisting it for about two years, I acceded to my wife's request to apply for Social Security "disability" insurance. I knew that I wasn't disabled, but we were broke, so I went in and applied, feeling ashamed for even being there.



A nice young man filled out forms by asking us questions. Then he set up an appointment with a doctor who contracts out to the federal government. He was a Psychiatrist. Nearly a month later, we attended the appointment. He was a nice guy. It was easy to chat with him. We joked and verbally cavorted for about 45 minutes. My various difficulties with life did come up, but he didn't seem too worried about them. When we left his office, I told Sheryl that I was more convinced than ever that I was not actually disabled. A little excitable, yes. But not actually disabled.



Two months later we were living with my wife's folks, a shameful thing in itself for a guy in his fifties. I got a call from a young man one day who said he worked at the local Social Security office. I assumed he had more questions. Instead, he told me that I'd been granted 100% disability! I'm still stunned by that to this day. Apparently, the nice, chatty guy considered me to be a "broken" person or something. While most people who apply for Social Security disability insurance are turned down constantly until they get a lawyer to fight for them, I was approved on the first application.



This has led me to do much thinking since then. I still do part time work outside in the warm months. But, other than that, I'm pretty useless. I wish I could talk to Dr. Barnes about all this, but he's probably gone beyond the veil by now and I don't know where he went to live when he retired. One thing I'm sure of, though. There's still shame involved in being on relief.

A Brief Scan of Photos, Scanned and Otherwise.

The Family von Humphries

I've been spending hours and hours lately scanning old photos. I've also taken a lot of photos in recent days and weeks. Much can be learned from these activities. Perhaps the most obvious lesson to be learned from looking at photos old and new is that no generation of children or adults has a monopoly on cuteness and lovability.

Here you will see examples of present and past children and a few adults who have brought joy, companionship, and peace of heart, not to mention hours and hours of entertainment to the writer of this blog. Appropriate captions are provided.

Heidi practices making the boys' hearts go beat, beat.,

Mino and his Granddad, Egin.


Our little Dixie Darling.

A welcome kiss to Eliza from big brother Dallin.

Dallin and his dad on the day of Eliza's advent.

Dallin James Haeberle as Joe Cool

Aric Armell inspects damage done from 200 yards yesterday.

Aric in Sepia tones with my 109 year old Swedish Mauser.

Aric assaults the gong from 200 yards with the Swedish Mauser.

Aric and Zannita's daughter, Akira, two nights ago at our house.

Eliza and Dallin freshly arrived from school on his birthday.

Andrew is entertained by his tired old dad.

Perpetually pretty Mary on Dallin's 8th birthday.

Molly Susanne Haeberle, 6 February 2009.

Molly, aka "the Face."

Andrew "Dimples" Haeberle

Matthew Sterling Haeberle

Mary with numbers 4 and 5 and number six within.

Till Death Does Them Part; But At Least It's a Start!

On the evening of 24 January 2009, at about 1930 hours, our dear friends Zanitta Fast Horse and Aric Armell got married. They're such good people! Naturally, we'll be the best friends we can be to them regardless of the future. But we really are hoping for an opportunity to bring this great family into the Church and see them sealed in the temple some day. There's so much for everybody to pray about. If we tried covering everything, we'd never get up from our knees! But, if you get an extra moment, please pray for the Armells. We just love them.