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Why Personal History Matters

  Ellis and Lucille had picked the worst possible time to marry and start a family.   They had also picked the worst possible place.   They were dry land wheat farmers in Eastern Colorado and had started all these endeavors just before the beginning of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. They lost the farm, moved into the nearby town of Wray, Colorado and Ellis began hiring himself out as a day-laborer.   Lucille was pregnant with their fourth child when Ellis found regular work helping to unload box cars at the railroad yard.   That was where the accident happened. Ellis was working a pulley when the rope broke and the metal chassis of a car came down on him, breaking his back.   He would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.   The family lived hand to mouth for years.   Slowly (I can not imagine how slowly) Ellis started a knife sharpening business in his garage.   Lucille opened a flower shop out of the front room of ...
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ICE is Like New Math

I am a lifer in education.   I started teaching in 1968 and kept at it until my retirement. During that time, I saw some poor ideas come along, die from lack of pedagogical vigor and then be resurrected a generation later by another group of misguided zealots.   One of these was New Math.  To understand New Math you must understand how devastating the U.S.S.R.’s launch of Sputnik was to the free world.   I remember standing out in the cold, clear Colorado air with my family and our neighbors watching for the pinpoint of light moving across the night sky.   There it was.   Sputnik.   A Russian space satellite, the first in the world, and it wasn’t ours.   It was the enemy’s satellite, doing God knows what, circling the entire world impervious to American intervention.   The race for space was suddenly real, and we were running a distant second.   My parents were the generation that fought in both WWII and the Korean War.   They...
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A Coward and a Liar Tries to Cast Shade on Real Heroes

  President Donald Trump has sparked global indignation by suggesting NATO troops avoid frontline combat, minimizing the sacrifice made by America’s allies.   These are lies, they are the work of Trump and Putin acting together and they are hypocritical from Old Bone Spurs, who used daddy’s money to avoid military service five times.        Here is just one example of Trump’s lie.      While visiting some friends on Vancouver Island, Canada, my husband and I were taken to a memorial on Radar Hill in the interior mountains of the island.    The memorial was a commemoration of the 2 nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (2 PPCLI) and their moment of exceptional valor which occurred during the Battle of Kapyong, April 22-25, 1951.        The Korean War is frequently referred to as the, “forgotten” war.    It certainly isn’t by those who fought there, much less th...
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The Goddess is Ever Present on Thanksgiving

 I have a Thanksgiving morning ritual.   Up before dawn, I make my coffee (Minnesotan’s don’t do much before coffee), clean the turkey, sauté the giblets and start chopping up the onion and celery for the dressing.   While they are cooking, I carry my coffee cup to the door, and step out on the cold, silent porch.    I count the subdued lights filtered through the curtains of every kitchen window.   I know that each small beacon represents a woman starting the hours of work that is the Thanksgiving feast.   This is a day designed to remind each of us that no matter what budgeting, what careful use of leftovers, what creativity needed in bargain cuts and coupons it takes, our families will be fed. And on this day of Thanksgiving, there will be food in abundance. Everyone has a favorite holiday.   Mine has always— always —been Thanksgiving.   As a child it meant the best food, unremitting talk and board games played, sitting cross-legged on t...
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Veterans Day

  There is a photograph on the wall of my sister’s home that is both precious and haunting to me.   It is a restored, blown up and framed photo of my father on his way to the South Pacific during World War II.   It was taken by an Army photographer from a small tender craft as my Dad’s ship, the S.S. Monterey, left harbor.   In a happy accident, the picture was taken with a close up of Pfc. Frank G. Yatckoske front and center.   He is in the midst of a host of soldiers leaning over the rail, all smiling and mugging for the camera.   My father is leaning out from the rest, his arms braced on the rail of the ship, his smile—a straight, wide grin filled with mischief—is set in a young, lean, handsome face.   Every man on that ship seems filled with enthusiasm, bonhomie, even a sense of adventure. Those poor young men didn’t have a clue.               I don’t want to contemplate what happ...
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