This is something that was told to me by someone who is a self-styled "Civil War" expert. Someone who teaches the subject occasionally at Gettysburg College, site of the tidewater battle.
So there, enough of the qualifcation.
Unknown to many, me included, I was told that General Sickles was, off-stage, a little difficult when given direction. Read: I don't like being told what to do.
He damned near sunk us at Gettysburg Battlefield, but, luckily, the command Geenerals planned properly and saved the day on the final defense of Cemetery Hill, no thanks to General Dan.
More about that later.
. So, as the story told to me goes, when General Dan was away, going his own damned thing, Scott Key's kid was across the street doing the Mrs. Quite a lot, so I was informed.
The Mrs, as the story goes, had no objection.
General Dan finally got word of the above in between firing off his own guns somewhere, rode back to DC, hung out down the street and watched the kid crossing the street and entering his house and prompting shot the interloper dead on his steps.
No, no trial, no big deal. Apparently, as was the day, his skills were needed at the front more than at the end of a rope so justice is as justice was in 1864
What do you call that? Compassionate Passion?
###
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Thursday, August 9, 2012
The Late Andy Rooney in a B-17
We all probably know that Rooney flew two missions on a B-17 during World War II. He was based in England and flew over over the English Channel into the first mission into Germany.
It was in a wing of 500 B-17s that struck Wilemshaven, a location that manufactured ball bearings. As most men know, those components are vital to making engines.
A B-17 has two decks in the nose: the top deck is the cockpit where the pilot sits in an almost cocoon like left-seat. On his right is a rather wide panel of buttons, lights, dials and switches wedged between he and the co-pilot on the right side of the compartment, also wedged in to the other side of the small space. In between them stands the flight engineer who doubles as the top turret gunner.
In the lower deck, right under the three men are the navigator, sitting on his office chair, at his desk,and in front of him, in the nose is the bombardier/machine gunner.
Andy Rooney was only 24 when he was assigned as a reporter for Stars and Stripes newspaper to doa story about Ameicas first strike into Germany's heart land. As he described it, he was not very nervous - right up until the navigator keeled over blue in the face from lack of oxygen.
Rooney was in modern parlance, just short of a peace activist, admitting in his book that he had flirted with Socialism back in his day. And, when you read his book, "My War," one can easily discern his political leaning. He was photographed for the cover standing in front of a load of 1000 pound bombs in Class A uniform, holding a rose. We got the message, Andy.
He hated most of the Generals, particularly General Patton, claiming credit for being one of the "nagging " reporters who always chased him for negative comments.
In the cramped lower deck of the navigator/bombarder's quarters, Rooney was strapped into a tight spot on the right bulkhead between one of the yellow oxygen tanks and an aft bulkhead at the end of the small compartment.
About 45 minutes before the IP, they were jumped by all the enemy fighters in the world and the shooting started. The navigator collapsed. Rooney called up to the 20 year old pilot asking instructions. The pilot told him what to do and he did it, his oxygen mask iced up. Andy cleared it, got him back on his feet, breathing, and shooting both .50 caliber machine guns in minutes.
The mission was successful, the pilot said that Andy probably saved the airplane and Rooney got a medal for it. He was geniunely embarassed about it.
Rooney flew another mission out of another English base which he described as uneventful. To get a true picture of Andy Rooney, I recommend picking up a copy of his book, My War. It will turn around your mental picture of the man.
###
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Catch - 22,+ an old, Bold Pilot from 15th Air Force
I was in the B-17 Museum in TucsonI when this old guy walked in wearing a crinkled leather jacket. He waddled over to a chair, caught his breathe and said, " C'mere, kid."
At 72, arthritis raising hell, I momentarily appreciated the comment. " you everf fly one of those things, " he asked me with a kind of, I'm gonna dump all over you look on his face.
I backed off, No I told him.
" And you did, Right?" He yes, 15th Air Force in Italy, two years and he quipped, " did you ever see the movie with Allen Arkin, called Catch 22?
We talked for a while, his group flew the famous Ploesti Air Raids over Rumania, the losses were heavy, and I remember other 15th pilots telling me of 20% losses on each mission. The old guy said, yes, it was true, and after 5 missions, you were considered 100% dead.
"Incidentally, " he said on the way out the door, " the movie...Catch 22? Everything you saw in that movie was true. Everything. I went through it all. "
###
At 72, arthritis raising hell, I momentarily appreciated the comment. " you everf fly one of those things, " he asked me with a kind of, I'm gonna dump all over you look on his face.
I backed off, No I told him.
" And you did, Right?" He yes, 15th Air Force in Italy, two years and he quipped, " did you ever see the movie with Allen Arkin, called Catch 22?
We talked for a while, his group flew the famous Ploesti Air Raids over Rumania, the losses were heavy, and I remember other 15th pilots telling me of 20% losses on each mission. The old guy said, yes, it was true, and after 5 missions, you were considered 100% dead.
"Incidentally, " he said on the way out the door, " the movie...Catch 22? Everything you saw in that movie was true. Everything. I went through it all. "
###
Saturday, June 16, 2012
American Airlines vs. US Air Potential Merger
The name of this blog is "Things people Tell Me" as in here say, opinions...I pass them along as interesting. As a former reporter, now docent in a B-17 Museum, I meet tons of super-interesting people, engage them in conversation, ask questions and their lives spill out. Here is one of them.
I don't normally hear of conversations involving words that contain, profit and loss, or pension over-rides, loss, prevention, risk management, and other more sophisticated financial terms reserved for high-end Wharton School educational classes.
This afternoon, I did from two US Air flight attendants.
" Don't get us started they said," and they were angry about losing their pensions. Flying for years, and loving it, they interspersed their vindictive against the industry with the hatred of how quickly the commercial airlines dump the pensions of long-term, long-time employees who have grown with the same airlines for decades.
The reason? One attendant said, the profit margin of a
"really good airlines" was maybe 3%, tops. When JETA fuel jumps 400% as it has recently, airlines can't jump fares because you and I won't fly, so they swallow it and dump pensions and other items just to stay in the air.
Merging with American Airlines will happen, only just to keep their name around - they are already insolvent.
The other attendant said that some four-holer left-seat pilots (big jet left-seat pilots) will stand to lose close to a million bucks in PENSIONS.
I ASKED, " WHAT EXACTLY do pilots do after losing their pensions after flying all those years?" Flying for foreign carriers after the age of 60, until they drop over, or
" anything they can, until the end," she told me.
One, she knows, dropped out and is serving coffee in a cafe in Evergreen Colorado, nestled high up about 10,000 feet in the Rockys. He has a small cabin just up the Creek, and motors down the road to his job at the cafe every day meeting his customers, serving coffee and donuts. He'll do that, she said, for the rest of his life.
He was a jet captain for a major airlines for 26 years before he lost his pension.
###
I don't normally hear of conversations involving words that contain, profit and loss, or pension over-rides, loss, prevention, risk management, and other more sophisticated financial terms reserved for high-end Wharton School educational classes.
This afternoon, I did from two US Air flight attendants.
" Don't get us started they said," and they were angry about losing their pensions. Flying for years, and loving it, they interspersed their vindictive against the industry with the hatred of how quickly the commercial airlines dump the pensions of long-term, long-time employees who have grown with the same airlines for decades.
The reason? One attendant said, the profit margin of a
"really good airlines" was maybe 3%, tops. When JETA fuel jumps 400% as it has recently, airlines can't jump fares because you and I won't fly, so they swallow it and dump pensions and other items just to stay in the air.
Merging with American Airlines will happen, only just to keep their name around - they are already insolvent.
The other attendant said that some four-holer left-seat pilots (big jet left-seat pilots) will stand to lose close to a million bucks in PENSIONS.
I ASKED, " WHAT EXACTLY do pilots do after losing their pensions after flying all those years?" Flying for foreign carriers after the age of 60, until they drop over, or
" anything they can, until the end," she told me.
One, she knows, dropped out and is serving coffee in a cafe in Evergreen Colorado, nestled high up about 10,000 feet in the Rockys. He has a small cabin just up the Creek, and motors down the road to his job at the cafe every day meeting his customers, serving coffee and donuts. He'll do that, she said, for the rest of his life.
He was a jet captain for a major airlines for 26 years before he lost his pension.
###
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Pistols, Handguns, and all things about carrying them
In Alaska, there are three handgun training centers operated by governmental facilities, usually the state police, or the local city government: Fairbanks, Anchorage, and like the guy from Texas, can't remember the third.
The NRA sponsors instructors who come from one of those centers to travel the lower 48 to TRAIN local police department handgun instructors on how to safely handle pistols for patrol officers in the street.
By accident, as usual for me, I met the guy, last night in the B-17 Museum while on duty as a docent. What an interesting conversation.
Alaska, you may know, is one of the states, like Arizona with an open carry lack of laws, that is to say, " you got a gun - go right a head and carry it. No permits, no licenses, no by-your-leave. If you feel so inclined to feel the need, or threatened - do it. The only proviso is you must NOT be a convicted felon, just like in Arizona. IF they catch you, convicted felons, with a pistol, bad things happen.
However, as logic and day follows the night, the bad guys don't listen to the law, anyway. So honest Alaskans like Arizonans can carry pistols open or hidden at their pleasure.
I asked the question of him, my Alaskan friend: Since your laws have been dropped, has gun violence gone up, or down? Down, he said. All police in Alaska report that it is quieter. " It's strange...we've become a more polite state," he quipped.
###
The NRA sponsors instructors who come from one of those centers to travel the lower 48 to TRAIN local police department handgun instructors on how to safely handle pistols for patrol officers in the street.
By accident, as usual for me, I met the guy, last night in the B-17 Museum while on duty as a docent. What an interesting conversation.
Alaska, you may know, is one of the states, like Arizona with an open carry lack of laws, that is to say, " you got a gun - go right a head and carry it. No permits, no licenses, no by-your-leave. If you feel so inclined to feel the need, or threatened - do it. The only proviso is you must NOT be a convicted felon, just like in Arizona. IF they catch you, convicted felons, with a pistol, bad things happen.
However, as logic and day follows the night, the bad guys don't listen to the law, anyway. So honest Alaskans like Arizonans can carry pistols open or hidden at their pleasure.
I asked the question of him, my Alaskan friend: Since your laws have been dropped, has gun violence gone up, or down? Down, he said. All police in Alaska report that it is quieter. " It's strange...we've become a more polite state," he quipped.
###
Monday, May 28, 2012
On Memorial Day weekend, I was at the B-17 Museum here in Tucson, and the perky, lovely, very friendly descendant of Laura Ingalls Wilder walked into our museum, toured our place and we had a wonderful discussion about life, politics and the difference between " Washington and D.C."
She lives there.
Washington, she explains is where "real people" live - that's you and I, if we can afford it. "DC" is where the politicos live, and she says, "they come, and they go."
She was very open about the politics the town, saying that the majority population is "African American," (and has been since the Civil War, BTW). My ancestors were stationed there in Dan Sickles Corps, often wrote back to the family describing the life, the times, and the people there.
Laura said the folks in Washington were very down on Obama because "he failed to meet their expectations" prior to the election of 08. A lot of grumbling in the hold, so to speak. I asked her whether her finger on the local pulse gave her any indication as to which way they might vote in six months: up, down, or sit it out. She was evasive.
My gut feeling, Ms Ingalls was very pro-Obama.
We spoke of her famous ancestor, and of the cabin from which the writings grew, the homestead in Sedan, Kansas, just an hour north of Tulsa, Oklahoma and thirty minutes by car from Coffeyville, Kansas. The cabin is still there, a one-room affair with one window, over it hangs a one page copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Bible verses she relied on during time of trial and stress. I still have copies I carry with me.
Laura Ingalls had been to the same cabin, and to the one room school house 20 yards to the west of it,
I felt an instant emotional connection to her, our mutual American roots, the school room, the values. I didn't get time to talk to her about her great grandmother, her time as a child looking out that window watching the long line of Indians trailing over the ridge from time-to-time just 150 yards to the west, a shotgun cradled in her lap.
But, this is a new day, the 21st Century, with a new economy system, where the government takes care of everyone, or, at least it tries to.
No more individualism, like her great grandmother, sitting alone in a cabin, hours away by horse, self-sufficient, armed with a shotgun, confident in her own ability to protect herself, father outside plowing the fields and planting, all the while under threat of deadly attack.
Things change. Don't they?
###
She lives there.
Washington, she explains is where "real people" live - that's you and I, if we can afford it. "DC" is where the politicos live, and she says, "they come, and they go."
She was very open about the politics the town, saying that the majority population is "African American," (and has been since the Civil War, BTW). My ancestors were stationed there in Dan Sickles Corps, often wrote back to the family describing the life, the times, and the people there.
Laura said the folks in Washington were very down on Obama because "he failed to meet their expectations" prior to the election of 08. A lot of grumbling in the hold, so to speak. I asked her whether her finger on the local pulse gave her any indication as to which way they might vote in six months: up, down, or sit it out. She was evasive.
My gut feeling, Ms Ingalls was very pro-Obama.
We spoke of her famous ancestor, and of the cabin from which the writings grew, the homestead in Sedan, Kansas, just an hour north of Tulsa, Oklahoma and thirty minutes by car from Coffeyville, Kansas. The cabin is still there, a one-room affair with one window, over it hangs a one page copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Bible verses she relied on during time of trial and stress. I still have copies I carry with me.
Laura Ingalls had been to the same cabin, and to the one room school house 20 yards to the west of it,
I felt an instant emotional connection to her, our mutual American roots, the school room, the values. I didn't get time to talk to her about her great grandmother, her time as a child looking out that window watching the long line of Indians trailing over the ridge from time-to-time just 150 yards to the west, a shotgun cradled in her lap.
But, this is a new day, the 21st Century, with a new economy system, where the government takes care of everyone, or, at least it tries to.
No more individualism, like her great grandmother, sitting alone in a cabin, hours away by horse, self-sufficient, armed with a shotgun, confident in her own ability to protect herself, father outside plowing the fields and planting, all the while under threat of deadly attack.
Things change. Don't they?
###
Monday, May 21, 2012
Life in Australia --- This is Real, not romantic
He walked into the Museum one Saturday recently and spent a lot of time talking with me about life, "down-under." Food, housing, land-mas, ages, families, the 'other inhabitants and such, what it was like to live on a land-mass as big as America.
Imagine his country, the exact same size as America, BUT, 80% of the 17 million population - yeah, that's it - live within 25 miles of the coast along the northeast and eastern boarder. He told me, that's like having everyone you know living from Boston to Atlanta crammed from the beach in as far as you can drive for an hour.
And, that's it.... after that, you're on your own.
Australia and America are about the same size, he told me, so, if you live on the beach in Jersey and you start to drive west bound towards Chicago at 8 in the morning, by lunch, you see nobody. Zip, no cars, zero.
All of this in a land where carrying a gun is illegal. My Aussie friend, "Joe" says that pistols are a big NO-NO down under. Carry one it's jail. Rifles, you'd better belong to a shooting club and prove it. One can always get a license for a shotgun to go hunting. But, that's it.
Joe says, drive an hour west into the center of Australia, and no one is there. The entire center of the country is devoid of population. " A large city to us is one with 2,000 people in it." What a place this country must be, I think to myself!!. I ask him, what happens if you are deep within the interior and you get into trouble? What form of back up do you have? He avoids the questions about fire-arms until I press the point.
He answers, " Many Aussies hide pistols, even though it is illegal."
Crime rates are going up in Australia, yes, the lax, liberal government is noting with the usual degree of frustration that the gun laws don't seem to work for the people who violate them, since criminal elements go ahead and
violate both civil, criminal laws and the public at large anyway.
Here in Arizona, open gun laws - the freedom to carry concealed and/or open guns has been the order of the day for nearly two years. NRA and other enthusiasts have been taking informal polls of various police officers since the law was enacted, and, trends have been noted that gun crimes are down, and as one officer noted, " it's been quieter in Tucson since everyone can safely assume everyone else MAY be carrying a weapon.
Joe, the Australian seems amazed at the local civility.
###
Imagine his country, the exact same size as America, BUT, 80% of the 17 million population - yeah, that's it - live within 25 miles of the coast along the northeast and eastern boarder. He told me, that's like having everyone you know living from Boston to Atlanta crammed from the beach in as far as you can drive for an hour.
And, that's it.... after that, you're on your own.
Australia and America are about the same size, he told me, so, if you live on the beach in Jersey and you start to drive west bound towards Chicago at 8 in the morning, by lunch, you see nobody. Zip, no cars, zero.
All of this in a land where carrying a gun is illegal. My Aussie friend, "Joe" says that pistols are a big NO-NO down under. Carry one it's jail. Rifles, you'd better belong to a shooting club and prove it. One can always get a license for a shotgun to go hunting. But, that's it.
Joe says, drive an hour west into the center of Australia, and no one is there. The entire center of the country is devoid of population. " A large city to us is one with 2,000 people in it." What a place this country must be, I think to myself!!. I ask him, what happens if you are deep within the interior and you get into trouble? What form of back up do you have? He avoids the questions about fire-arms until I press the point.
He answers, " Many Aussies hide pistols, even though it is illegal."
Crime rates are going up in Australia, yes, the lax, liberal government is noting with the usual degree of frustration that the gun laws don't seem to work for the people who violate them, since criminal elements go ahead and
violate both civil, criminal laws and the public at large anyway.
Here in Arizona, open gun laws - the freedom to carry concealed and/or open guns has been the order of the day for nearly two years. NRA and other enthusiasts have been taking informal polls of various police officers since the law was enacted, and, trends have been noted that gun crimes are down, and as one officer noted, " it's been quieter in Tucson since everyone can safely assume everyone else MAY be carrying a weapon.
Joe, the Australian seems amazed at the local civility.
###
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