history


24
Mar 16

More family photos

There are whole chunks of things I don’t know about. That’s only my fault. So I try, on some of my visits, to fill in the gaps.

For instance, these are my grandmother’s parents:

That’s a familiar picture, though I don’t remember the two of them. Here’s a picture of them I don’t think I’ve ever seen before:

The boys in the background are my great-uncles. The years melt away, but the same mischief is just noticeable in the eyes you can see on the left margin of the shot. That’s a familiar look. They were old when I was young, but only in that way that adults are old to children. Their creeping up there in years now, of course, but you still see that in the eyes. To see them as ankle biters themselves is amusing.

This picture is a few years later than the previous one. This is my grandmother’s senior portrait:

Cute girl, right? She grew up in the narrowest wide spot in the road in a tucked away corner of northwest Alabama that it is still hard for most people to find. In her yearbook she quoted a first century Syrian, taken as a slave to Italy where he won the favor of his master, who freed and educated him. Publilius Syrus became a writer and actor. The quote: “When we stop to think we often miss our opportunity.”

My grandmother was in the Glee Club and Future Homemakers of America.

Me and my grandmother today. Still a pretty lady:

This is my grandfather’s father. Never met him:

Back with the folks. Allie has been patiently waiting at the table for a treat.


4
Mar 16

“Lucky we were there! It was a historical event!”

There are two days left to see “Assassins,” a Stephen Sondheim musical, at Telfair Peet.

It is powerful show, which goes some good way toward humanizing the people who have attempted, and succeeded, in killing American presidents. The entire production is students and they did a GREAT job. It is dark and comical and thoughtful and full of characters who are inept and darkly successful.

The primary players are: John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, and his accomplice David Herold; Charles Guiteau, who killed President James Garfield; Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of President William McKinley; Giuseppe Zangara who tried to kill President-elect Franklin Roosevelt. There’s also Lee Harvey Oswald, Samuel Byck who targeted President Richard Nixon, John Hinckley who shot President Ronald Reagan and both Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, who attacked President Gerald Ford.

(Also, Ford did a walk-on spot and tripped on the stage. The few of us olds in the theater got it. No one under 30 understood the bit.)

The Broadway version of the play won five Tonys Awards. I wonder if anyone ever told Hinckley, who is still taking family furloughs from his institutional psychiatric care (but may soon be released). Fromme was paroled in 2009 and apparently lives in the Mohawk Valley region of New York. Moore was released in 2007. You figure they have to know there is a play featuring them as primary characters.

A friend of ours is the director of the show. I can’t wait to sit down with him soon and hear more about it. Mostly I just like to brag on the players and crew. They always do such a great job, as full time students no less, of bringing together incredibly productions.


15
Feb 16

Three amazing things

This video dates back to 1897 and is purported to be the oldest videos of Paris on record:

This guy is paragliding through the Aurora Borealis.

Ordinarily I’d be jealous of an experience like that, but I saw this today, kitteh yoga:


20
Jan 16

Melts in my hand

Melts in your mouth, not in your hand. That was the slogan, right? That’s the jingle. The motto that the Mars people and the M&Ms sloganeers gave us that line — it was originally a pitch to the U.S. Army — in 1954. So even though you don’t hear it every day anymore, its been in our minds all of our lives.

You can’t hardly see an M&M without thinking about that line.

It melts in your mouth, not in your hand.

And yet, when I have the chance to enjoy some M&M’s, it looks like I’ve been slapping The Joker around:


4
Jan 16

Hanging out at Forsyth Park

Forsyth Park is full of history. It was created in the 1840s, and was, in a way, an original part of the future plans of Savannah. French and American soldiers camped on the site during the Revolutionary War around bloody fighting in the town. The French started building siege trenches there and, then just two generations later, the Georgia home guard drilled on the park during the Civil War. The town’s Confederate monument is there.

This is where The Yankee I visit every time we come to Savannah. We have a tree. We got engaged there and took some of our wedding portraits there. It is a beautiful place and has a lot of history, and contemporary vitality, too.

At a nearby novelty shop:

Funny t-shirts:

Late, late editions … watch the lights in these Boomerang videos: