The Blaisdell Blog

  “A lady never admits her feet hurt…”  says Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes .  This is just one more line from a list of good ones from a fun movie.  I also learned (the hard way) that a comfortable pair of shoes may not solve your day’s problems, but they can make tackling them a little easier.   Being dedicated to comfortable footwear, I was willing to take my granddaughter’s recommendation to try a pair of Hey, Dude shoes.  I plan on buying more of these casual canvas slip-ons because they fit the reasonable requirements for consumer consumption: desirability, quality and cost.  Besides being a Marilyn Monroe fan, I am also a trained economist and as such I am smarter than Donald Trump.  He wants to put a tariff on my Hey Dudes. He also insists that these tariffs are paid by the country the items come from and not the American public.  He is, of course, wrong. Let me explain. A tariff is a tax on goods import...

  Fifty years ago today, Colonel Ralph Albertazzie, then pilot of Air Force One, was flying over Jefferson City, MO with President Richard Milhous Nixon and his family on board.   He was taking the Nixon’s home to California. Passing the mid-Missouri air control, he received word that Vice President Gerald R. Ford had just been sworn in as President of the United States. Albertazzie contacted ground control and gave this message: "Kansas City, this was Air Force One. We are now re-designating as SAM 27000." The reversion of the plane to its assigned tail number indicated there was no longer a President on board. Nixon had resigned a few hours before and was heading into a shameful retirement.   The resignation, the shame, the enduring stain on what was, in many ways, a laudable Presidency was the result of Nixon’s Presidential hubris and latent moral flaws.   I met Richard Nixon once.   I was at the Western States Young Republicans’ Convention in Albuquerq...

       Over the Labor Day weekend in 1933 Florence Klingensmith, a young aviator from Kragnes Township, Minnesota arrived in Chicago.  She was there to compete for the Phillips Trophy.  It was $10,000 in prize money, but she would have to earn it.  The air race was twelve laps over an eight-mile course around three pylons. Klingensmith was an experienced stunt pilot, but this was the first time she would compete against men.  During the race she impressed everyone with the skill she showed going around the pylons, frequently banking her plane into a near vertical turn.  But on the last lap, with Florence in the lead, the wing of her Gee Bee plane started to fall apart, the fabric shredded, and the wing folded against the fuselage.  Klingensmith fought the stick and got her plane away from the stands filled with spectators before it nosed into the ground.  She died on impact, breaking almost every bone in her body....