Saturday, May 17, 2003
OUR YOUNG PEOPLE
'Tis the season for older people to speak to younger people about the blessings of Graduation Day from all levels of formal school training. It is important that young - and all of us - be reminded of how important that Great Day is in our lives.
Blue Ridge Community College, located at Weyers Cave, Virginia made a wise choice again this year in having Belle S. Wheelan as their commencement day speaker. She, with no attempt to be outstandingly different, chose the theme which kept telling graduating students :”Don't stop now! Learning is a lifelong process!”
Rachel Campise, a BBRC student speaker, who plans to continue her education at Virginia Commonwealth University, did what I like to call a commendable “warm up” just ahead of the words of the keynote speaker and she held the attention of the crowd of about eight hundred or so listeners reminding them of bike champion Lance Armstrong's motto: “Turn every negative into a positive!” Campise said she saw evidence of that sort of tenacity among fellow student at BBRC - “ Looking, seeking, searching always for something better - be ready to take that next step!”
When Belle S. Wheelan then stood before the same crowd more than few of us must have realized that she represented so well another type of the very same sort of personal dedication in order the get where she stands today. Belle S. Wheelan is Virginia's first black Secretary of Education.When tells young people today: “Don't stop now! Learning is lifelong process”. Her word rings with a sincerity which plainly states her own, individual gratitude for those elements of community involvement which have brought it into being for her and for all of us.
Secretary Wheelan has a sharp sense of humor, too.Older friends and family at the gathering, at moments shower swept and umbrella covered, heard her caution older people and, at the same time, alert some young ones, by saying: “Our children are our future!” There, she paused for a fraction of a second and her eyes twinkled brightly as she quipped: “They're going to pick our nursing homes.”
A.L.M. May 16, 2003 [c599wds]
Friday, May 16, 2003
A LARGER VIEW
An Englishman wrote the actual words many years ago, and by this time men and women in many nations have, no doubt had the opportunity to either hear them said or read them.
Right now, when we are beset with special problems associated with the durability of national entities, the seeming erosion of national symbols, and drastic changes in our standards of social and religious practices - culture, in genera, for that matter, the need is more urgent than ever.
That Englishman, Herbert George Wells wrote, or complied, what he called an "Outline of History.” He knew that our vast knowledge of mankind' s accomplishment, even in his time, were far too great to be considered other than in a terse, outlined form.
He took the view that we faced and era in which we wished to live in comparatively peaceful times we must realign our loyalties.
“Our true nationality is mankind.”
H.G. Wells, who exhibited special awareness of future possibilities, was a man who had a firm foothold in the realities of the past as well. His “outline” provides us with an amazingly accurate record of what man has done up to the point of publication in 1920.
It is plain to see , how much of the world's dislocation has resulted from our tendency to seek local, racial, religious, governmental, egocentrically oriented ambition, and attempt to befit one segment of society in preference to another. To me, in spite of its faults and shortcomings along way -always amply documented by critics – has, in truth, been one of the primary advocates of this larger concept of thinking of all us as Mankind rather than as small, narrow entities such as nations, political groups, isms” of various, religious amalgams and and all have manifested themselves dramatically at times in outbursts rapacity, murder, mayhem and monstrous mis-treatment of fellow member of society.
We have had leaders who had visions of such a time. I think Woodrow Wilson and others who favored a strong League of Nations, and , later, those who started the United Nations programs were forerunners in this concept of mankind being our true “nationality.”
Our restoration of Germany after two major wars. Or that of Japan, and our willingness to help other common people of Russia when the Soviet empire disintegrated. Even now we are field immense relief efforts to restore normal conditions to both Iraq and Afghanistan. We are also, I feel, displaying remarkable constraint in dealing with Fidel Castro and the eleven other dictators currently “at large” and mis-ruling large segments of our responsibility – mankind.
H.G. Well's prediction remains in out future We are not yet ready to make such a choice, But, I think that's where we are headed.
' "'Our true nationality is Mankind."
A.L.M. May 15, 2003 [c769wds]
Thursday, May 15, 2003
LESS KNOWN SPOTS
Much is made of the history of well-known spas and springs which dotted the sprawling Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Many were casualties of the Civil War, of course, and some just ceased to exist.
Wilson Springs was such a place, but instead of ceasing to exist during wartime, it prospered. It was located thirteen miles northwest of Lexington,Va. in Rockbridge County and, thus, not too far from the celebrated Natural Bridge of Virginia. It could be said to have been a strong contender among the smaller and less know spa locations. It was started around 1840.
The spring itself is an unusual one. It wells up from the middle of a small island in the Maury River . A Strickler family owned the site and they built a wooden footbridge from the river bank to the island so visitors could get to the springs. As with all springs in that era, it gave forth waters of medical excellence, although I find no evidence of any such claims being made. The Strickler's must have anticipated what could become of such a location, because they increased the size of their home to accommodate seventy persons.
A Wilson family purchased the 465-acre estate in 1843 and by the time the Civil War got underway records show there were at least thirty cabins nearby, in addition to the old house which became the Hotel center. Many of the cabins had been erected by residents of Lexington as “summer” places. Exact ownership was rather vague, records suggest, because all that was business transacted in a time when a man's word was the same, or better than, a written contract. Exactly who owned the cabins built on Wilson land was to be perplexing problem for many years.
Wilson Springs continued to operate until 1920. The old home then became a private home for many years a long, white columned building clothed in a growing cover of ivy covering upstairs and downstairs porches. Guests were few, however, and said never to have exceeded 250 during its best days. Many of the cabins were torn down when State Route 39 was cut through the area.. Those portions which remain are said to stand guard over the entrance to Goshen Pass.
As so often happens,, in 1857, a larger pavilion with more facilities was built down the road a few miles. It was named Jordon”s Spring, and later renamed Rockbridge Baths. After the war Gen. Robert E. Lee was a frequent visitor from Lexington and in 1875 a Confederate Army Doctor Samuel Brown Morrison, rented the place and used it as a sanitarium. In 1921 VMI held summer classes there, and in 1926, it followed the path of so many of the old spa hotels when it burned and was never rebuilt.
` Enough evidence is still seen to constantly revive memories of what it must have been like to visit the The Valley's “smaller places” each summer.
. A.L.M May 14, 2003 [c770wds]
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
FOOD? NO!!
Is it suddenly becoming hazardous to eat!
Almost daily, we are beset with a new threat to our choice of foods and warned that continued use of a specific food can only mean sure death.
Nothing, it seems, is exempt from being so marked.
The latest case to hit the news is the legal case in the courts in San Francisco. California at the moment seeking to forbid the sale of Oreo ® cookies to children. With that special limitation in place, it can't be long before we will be asked to show our age and ident details in order to buy some cookies for the kids.
Soon it will come about that just about anything you plan to eat, or to feed to small children , will be on the forbidden lists.
There seems to be no avenue of escape remaining.
The term “normal” no longer applies, either. Any use is said to be in excess. Parents, by and large, make the actual decision to buy a particular style or brand-name of cookies. To pretend that it is the child who makes the purchase is wrong. Playing the kid card is a favorite with foodfat chasers, it sees. That makes headlines, and shock bulletins on TV. There seems to be no state of “normality” one can seek.
Start with natural foods. Take the eight glasses of water we are supposed to drink each day. No! Don't! Far too, much! Critics point out that water leeches out the salt and minerals from our bodies and leaves us as stranded wrecks at the mercy of diseases. There are numerous cases of people dying from drinking too much water. Water “quality” ranges the entire gamut of taste and clarity The ideal ranges from special waters imported from Italy, France or Canada to cistern water from back porch roofs with bird droppings as a standard ingredient. It is said the eight glass routine was developed by persons selling bottled water. Many now pay more for bottled water than for gasoline with which to power their cars. We are now paying more for our garbage bags each year than eighty nations spend on everything for the year!
Breads ....beverages... veggies... desserts ...old favorites ..., eggs... untried novelties ...fast foods - slow foods ...refined or processed foods of any kind....baked, boiled or fried ! Restyled or genetically modified foods? Never! No!
It will be interesting to see what percentage of these “sued food” firms just happen to be properties of ”the big tobacco” companies. Check to see who owns the product being vilified. This may well prove to be a continuation of the nicotine war. Suit seekers
seem to have sensed some of those firms still seem to have money left in their other greedy pocket. Get it!
“Trans Fats!” is the latest battle cry being heard through the land.
A.L.M. May 12, 2003 [c750wds]
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
PIKE PROBLEMS
The construction of roads has not always been the responsibility of the government.
Egress to and from one part of property to another was more of the worry of the owners than the community. A man's road was
more personal than it is today. He used it and if anyone else wanted to do so they needed his permission. He built it; he maintained it. Our early history is filled with references to so-and-so's, road and very often such was the mark of a successful operation - firm, usable roads to all areas of the place. In many cases owners of new lands needed to have ready access and to help in keeping them passable they caused them to be closed to all comers and marked as “Toll Roads” the road and if you paid the fee and you were welcome use his road. With the fees the owner could keep the road in repair and a safer, surer, faster way was provided.
It was no accidental, however to find a stretch of road that connect fields to the grist mill came to have a Toll Road attached. Or, if there was an especially good spot at which to ford a stream, it too came to be served by a Toll Road. Sharp business practices in turn led to a need for the governmental element to move protect the needs of the common people. Small towns developed several means of access, extra roads which are still evident today and they can often be traced to trails which left the road cut across field and forest to avoid Toll Gates.
The Valley Pike used to have numerous toll gate locations. The last ones disappeared the late 1920's and early '30's. The Indian Road, or Trail, as settlements grew up along the way, was often called by the name of then next settlement. Later, when Tennessee and Kentucky opened up those traveling south called it The Knoxville Road, and those going north called it the Philadelphia Road. As a growing kid on the trail in the section of in southwestern Virginia, I remember seeing large, clumsy “Knoxville Wagons”, powered by ox teams, lumbering into the nearby Blacksmith's shop for rim and wheel repair. It was said they were adept at starting new, no-toll roads as needed. During the Civil War it became the Valley Pike and post war the Lee or Lee-Jackson Highway. Interstate 81 paralleled the route, bringing back the old Indian concept of a varied pattern of suitable trails, ironically. As government took over, state lottery funds were used to maintain the road, as well.
We take our highway system for granted today, and complain bitterly when potholes become a hazard. I remember when many of them were largely family obligations.
A.L.M. May 12, 2003 [c704wds]
Monday, May 12, 2003
U.S.S.ROANOKE
I read about a Navy cruiser named the USS Roanoke, and I like to think the vessel was named after the City of Roanoke,Virginia ,or, perhaps, after Roanoke Island off North Carolina.
Six hundred and eight feet long, sleek looking in the water the keep was started May 25, 1945 - that's fifty-eight years ago the week after next. The ship was “laid down”, as shipbuilder say, at the New York Shipbuilding Corp., Camden, NJ on that date. Two years later June 26, 1947 she was launched.
Th official record show she was the Fourth vessel in the US Navy to be named “Roanoke”, and I have been searching around a bit this afternoon for some facts about the other three, as well.
One has wide scope in which to seek such information - the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Civil War, Spanish-American War and World Wars I and II. I have been led to continue my search as I wondered if any of them have been named after the City of Roanoke. Virginia. Some could have been named in honor of the Roanoke Island settle settlement 1558 or so , but there is a hint contained in facts about the USS Roanoke – number 4 - launched in 1947, which pretty well settles that point for me. The USS Roanoke - the fourth one so designated was a CL-145) vessel - a cruiser. The young lady who “sponsored” the ship was a named Miss Julia Ann Henebry and that is a distinctively local name for the Roanoke, Virginia community area in my memory The ship served 22.2 years and was decommissioned in October 1958. She was berthed for a time of a time at Mare Island and sold to a used metal company in San Jose, Ca. In 1972.
What an end? Certainly there was nothing dramatic or exotic about the career of the USS Roanoke She had extended deployment as a part of the 6th fleet Battleship-Cruiser force in 1950 50 and from that time on alternated between 6th Fleet placements and operations until the spring of 1952 when she was started midshipmen's cruises in Europe and The Caribbean. On September 22, 1955 she departed Norfolk,Va. for the Panama Canal and was home ported at Long Beach Ca. where she conducted a series of Naval Reserve Cruises and other duties.
Among the other ships named “Roanoke” was a “Replenishment Oiler”...659-feet long, 640 at the waterline... and a smaller “Science Ship” and there is another somewhere in the records which, thus far, has eluded me.
.A.L.M. May 11, 2003 [c677wds]
Sunday, May 11, 2003
GALSWORTHY, JOHN
Is John Galsworthy read by many people anymore?
I suppose we could say he was “in”during the late 1020 and th early '30's. It was in 1932 that he won the Nobel Prize for his strong series known as “The Forsythe Saga”. I remember that, but, at that time, I was not in the mood, I suppose to read a three generational sweep of one families intricate relationships. Furthermore, the Saga as a thing spread out over a period of years. The first part I must have considered to be old-fashioned; the additions as topical, and the later ones - or Part II - a tack-ons. The overall struck me as being at about the same level as was soap opera writing for radio at that time.
That judgment was and unwise on my part, I find, because as I read portions of it of sequence it struck me as being more like a mixture of Thackerey and Dickens, two of my a favorite writers and also two Galsworthy was said to have studied in detail. He started series with a novel in 1904 called “The Island Pharisees” which he revised twice, once in 1904 and again in 1908. Other sections followed in l901, '21, '24 and 1929. The completed saga - gathered together over the span of all those tumultuous years - won the Nobel Prize in 1932.
The story, viewed as a whole, a tragic one based on the real life of his cousin Arthur Galsworthy and IK can understand my own hesitancy in accepted it earlier.
Galsworthy made good sensational copy, too. It is amazing tome, he was not featured more in the tabloid areas of writing. He married Ada Person Cooper and lived with her for ten years in secret because he felt his father would not approve of the marriage, she having been the somewhat battered wife of curious cousin Arthur. When Daddy died , son John became financially independent, you see.
John Galsworthy had some strong views about writing, too, which may well have kept some of us from from reading him with any enthusiasm. He felt that writing always had mission and that novels , in particular,were intend to point out to the world that something was amiss, but that they were not intended to come up with any solution for such problems ...only to call attention to them dramatically and to get others to start thinking what might be done to change things which were wrong. He was concerned often with the improper division of wealth and the treatment of poor people, he favored the coal miner's strikes, he spoke out strongly for for prison reforms. He wrote on anti-Semitism in ”Escape” in 1926. It was filmed a second time in 1939 starring Rex Harrison. He served as a Red Cross worker in France during WWI. He had a knack for making some steadfast, dedicated enemies, as well. Both D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf did all they could to lower his reputation as a writer and to help its decline . He was accused of being too thoroughly involved in the very conditions of which he was so critical.
And, another thing which irked me over the years was the fact that we suddenly we were told he had written his earlier works under the assume pen name of John Sinjohn. I can understand a situation wherein a writer produces so much products that he finds it best to use a nom-de-plume for certain of his efforts to keep from cluttering the market place with his name and to keep cash flow steadier, but, this John Sinjohn ( I wonder how he arrived at that concoction!) suggests he was not too sure of his first literary efforts and that he re-claimed them and revised them only when it became profitable for him to do so.
A.L.M. May 10, 2003 [c999wds]
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