Friday Good News

Friends had many fine corrections for my tirade last week about the legislature.

Liz Moore gently reminded me that the category of “mental illness” already carries a stigma that makes it hard for people to ask for help. While some mental illness can lead to violence, it isn’t helpful to include all the good folks with different forms of mental illness in any list of gun violence perpetrators – terrorists, domestic abusers, and the heavily inebriated. Thanks for the very important reminder, Liz.

Ron Waterman wrote, “I believe the motto for the session was ‘If it ain’t broken, break it.’ There was no fixing in any of their actions.” His two lines would have been an excellent replacement for my whole blog.

Mark Hampton bettered my four-point plan for improving politics with this:
1. Establish a generous salary for legislators, and then deduct $10,000 for every new law enacted.
2. Establish a lean salary for the Governor, and then add $10,000 for every new piece of legislation vetoed.
3. Require every elected official to personally attend continuing education instruction every month; three hours each on constitutional law, ethics, and sensitivity training.
(A passing grade of 2.0 might be a stretch, however.)
4. Go back to no highway speed limit for legislators and have them take driver training on the West Boulder Road.

Mark, that has a sporting chance of Making Montana Great Again.

Did I mention sports? Good, because that’s more interesting than politics. I simply cannot wait until the restrictions on spectators are such that my brothers and I can attend high school and college sporting events together in person again.

I do realize that we are sports-deprived in Montana, as almost everywhere else in the US, even when we aren’t in a pandemic. We have to make do with football, basketball, track, hockey, baseball, soccer, golf, rodeo, and car-racing. In Montana you can add fishing tournaments and the annual bets on whose truck will go through the ice on Canyon Ferry Lake in the spring.

Still, we lack the glorious variety of sports found in more civilized countries in the world. For instance, our athletes never get to participate in the Gloucestershire (probably pronounced “Woostershur”) England annual Cheese Rolling festival. The contestants gather at the top of a very steep hill. A large slab of cheese, looking much like a giant hockey puck, is rolled down the hill. The goal is to catch the cheese, which is impossible, because the cheese has a one second head start and can attain a speed of 70 miles per hour, enough to seriously injure spectators. For that reason, the cheese has been replaced in recent years with a lightweight foam rubber disc, but the injuries to competitors racing down the steep and uneven hill continue unabated. Good fun for all.

Not to be outdone, Finland holds the annual Wife Carrying Championships. In a grudging nod to women’s equality, the spouse can be male, but they aren’t changing the name yet. There are no weight limits, and apparently the spouse doesn’t have to be your own. I expect that, like many sports, fights occasionally break out, when some spectators realize whose wife is being carried and where.

Finland used to hold the Annual Sauna World Championships, where people sit in a steaming hot room until they give up or pass out. The starting temperature for the men’s competition was 230 degrees Fahrenheit. I am not making this up. The competition was suspended after 2010 when a competitor died, even though prosecutors decided not to charge the event organizers with negligence. Perhaps the non-prosecution had to do with the deceased being a Russian.

I haven’t even mentioned tuna throwing (as big as a normal adult male human) in South Australia or Hurling in Ireland. No, not hurling in the pubs. It’s a form of field hockey but more dangerous.

Perhaps the sport with the fewest rules is Haxey Hood, played between the towns of Haxey and Westwoodside in England. The Sway (the mob of people around the hood) tries to get the hood (a piece of rolled canvas or leather) into one of four pubs in the two towns, followed by heavy drinking. Women and children usually do not play, I have read, because there is no time limit, and there is only one other rule. The hood cannot be thrown or carried, but must be pushed by moving the whole Sway toward one of the pubs. There are no organized teams. Injuries to participants, spectators, bushes, trees, and even walls are not uncommon. We have a similar game in Helena with just as few rules. It’s called the legislature, but it’s not as much fun and has more long-lasting injuries for spectators and the environment.

Last year Haxey Hood was canceled for the first time in 100 years because of the Covid pandemic. Too bad we didn’t do the same in Helena.

The legislature is gone and there is a song in our hearts. It’s one of those good old country songs – “Ain’t no trash in my trailer since the night I threw you out.”

This legislature seemed to operate on the old axiom, “If it ain’t broke, fix it.” And fix it they did. There has never been an issue with trans youth and sports in Montana, but the Republicans wanted to fix that by telling trans youth they aren’t trans anymore, and by telling doctors what they can and can’t do. There have never been problems with people being unable to murder others with guns in Montana, but they fixed that. Terrorists, domestic abusers, and even the heavily inebriated can now legally carry weapons of mass destruction into almost any place in Montana. It is still illegal to kill people once you are inside, but perhaps the next legislature will fix that.

Montana has not had enough people getting sick and dying of Covid 19 and its related effects. We aren’t number one, but the legislature took a good shot at fixing that. We won’t let health officials do their job, and we won’t allow towns to make decisions for themselves to protect their citizens.

Too many people voting who aren’t voting the right way? Voter suppression is the fix. Not enough taxpayer dollars going to support the burning of coal at Colstrip? Fixed. Too many rights for women and doctors making their own decisions about their bodies? Fixed. Too many towns banning vaping that is hooking their young people on nicotine? Fixed. Are judges making decisions based on the law rather than partisan beliefs? Several fixes are being tried.

So what can we do about this? I have several proposals. 1. Have the voters elect only people who have a basic sense of decency and intelligence. 2. Allow the legislature to meet only every other year. 3. Have the Supreme Court disqualify every law that violates the constitution without regard to politics. 4. Elect a governor who will use common sense, decency, and a regard for the Constitution to veto really bad legislative acts.

OK, so we tried all that, and it didn’t work. I guess my number 5 Proposal is to change our country song from the trailer trash one to the oldie but goodie, “Now that we’re both miserable, I hope you’re happy.”

Now when I am aging fast (and glad of it because I got both my Covid shots), I often lose or at least misplace things. This morning I realized I have lost my sense of humor. After looking all over the house in the places I usually misplace my glasses and/or keys, I finally did the most sensible thing. I looked on the internet to find out why it’s gone, and where I might have left it.

Fortunately, I found a website for the International Society for Humor Studies. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything humorous on the website, unless you consider as funny several extremely serious studies of humor which apparently preclude the researchers from being funny.

I also found several sites on Sigmund Freud and humor. I am not making this up. When you are going back to the old Comedy-Meister himself, you know you are in for real hilarity. In 1905 Freud wrote a book called Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. (My synopsis of the book: If people are unconscious when you finish the joke, the punchline was too long or the punch was spiked too hard.)

Humor is tough to pin down because we don’t all have the same taste. Some people might think this is funny: Stressing the importance of a good vocabulary, the teacher told her young charges, “Use a word ten times, and it shall be yours for life.” From somewhere in the back of the room came a small male voice chanting, “Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda.” OK, not many people think it’s funny, and especially not Amanda, so perhaps that proves my point, whatever it was.

Oh I remember, the point is that school provides a setting where our sense of humor was shaped, so I am revisiting school jokes in my search for my lost or misplaced humor.

The little boy wasn’t getting good marks in school, even though he really liked the young woman who was his teacher. One day he tapped his teacher on the shoulder and said, “I don’t want to scare you, Miss Kneffelcamp, but my daddy says if I don’t get better grades, somebody is going to get a spanking.” There, was that funnier? No? Not for teachers, I suppose. OK, not for me either.

Could I have left my sense of humor someplace that I no longer want to go because of the Covid restrictions? The airlines! That could be it. Maybe I left it in the overhead rack the last time I got off a flight.

Before the pandemic, a man got on a plane in first class. The flight attendant brought in a parrot and put it on the seat next to him. The man asked the parrot, “What are you doing here?” The parrot said, “My owners are billionaires. They let me go wherever I want as long as I am back by Saturday night to entertain their guests.”

After the plane got into the air, the flight attendant started serving drinks. “Hey you, dumb and ugly,” the parrot shouted at the flight attendant, “what’s the matter with you? Can’t you see I need a drink here?” She hurried over to bring a drink to the parrot. The man said, “Pardon me, ma’am, I need a drink…” but she turned away and started serving others.

The parrot shouted at the woman again, “You with the huge thighs, don’t you know I need peanuts to go with my drink?” Once again, the attendant stopped what she was doing and hurried to bring the parrot a packet of peanuts. “Pardon me, ma’am…” the man started, but she rushed back down the aisle where she had been serving before.

“I get it,” exclaimed the man to the parrot. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease. I can do this.” The man shouted toward the busy flight attendant, “Hey you, hippo lady, waddle on up here and give me a drink and do it right now.” The flight attendant nearly ran up to the cockpit. A second later, the enormous co-pilot came out. With one hand he grabbed the parrot, and with the other he yanked the man out of his seat. The co-pilot hauled them down the aisle, opened the exit door of the plane, and threw them both out.

On the way down, the parrot said to the man, “You’ve got a pretty bad mouth for a guy who can’t fly.”

Was that funnier? Not really? Hoo boy, I really have lost it. Don’t worry. I’ll keep looking. Did I leave it at my last doctor’s appointment? That was my urologist. No, Pat will never approve of me finding urologist jokes. Sorry, no humor in this Friday Good News.

I can be downright intolerant toward people like climate deniers and anti-vaxxers who don’t believe in science; but if I stop to think, I can understand them. Many of their ridiculous beliefs are just common sense, sort of.

Will vaccine protect me from Covid? Not necessarily. Even with two Pfizer shots, I am only “95%” protected, according to scientific studies. So why would a person get a shot that won’t provide absolute protection, and will probably hurt, when that person is 100% certain that he or she might not get the virus without the shot and might get the virus even with the shot? That is common sense. I didn’t say common sense is always smart.

Think about the folks who don’t believe in evolution, despite the scientists saying that all the covid variations are evolution at work. As far as common sense goes, I can’t see any difference in viruses. If evolution were real, humans would be getting smarter. Scientific observation will confirm that’s not the case, or we would all believe in evolution. See there?

A few still believe the earth is flat. Common sense is completely on their side. Well, not completely. In Iowa the earth is flat, but in Montana it is bumpy. But if the earth were round, people on the bottom would obviously fall off. If the earth were spinning around at roughly 1000 miles an hour, we would fly off into space. Common sense.

Common sense says the sun goes around the earth, not the other way around. The Bible is very clear about that. The writer of Ecclesiastes in chapter 1, verse 5, says, “The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises.” Well, duh. Anyone can see that. What you can’t see is the earth turning.

So far I’m being facetious about not believing science, but there are some “scientific facts” I don’t really believe. Scientific classification says that a tomato is a fruit rather than a vegetable. Because of scientists, Merriam Webster defines it this way: “Any thing that grows on a plant and is the means by which that plant gets its seeds out into the world is a fruit.”

By the scientific classification method, tomatoes, bell peppers, string beans, pea pods (but not the peas – they are “seeds”), jalapeῆo peppers, corn, and olives are all fruit.

Of course I don’t believe that. Tomatoes and all that other stuff except jalapeῆos taste like vegetables. Jalapeῆos must be a spice. Not facts, but common sense.

Scientific classification says Old World “true” buffalo (Cape buffalo and water buffalo) are native to Africa and Asia. Bison are found in North America and Europe. Both bison and buffalo are in the bovidae family, but the two are not closely related.

No one in Montana believes that. I have seen buffalo in Yellowstone Park with my own eyes. I have seen buffalo on the National Bison Range near Charlo…. OK, I am slipping into Trump-land where something is true if lots of other non-scientific people believe it. Face it, on some topics we are all in this together where we don’t know everything and wouldn’t much care if we did.

Of course, it doesn’t make much difference to our lives whether we think a tomato is a vegetable, or the sun goes around the earth, or bison are buffalo.

It doesn’t make any difference to our daily lives if we believe vaccines are more dangerous than non-vaccines. Unless of course we get the virus and die. Or worse, get a mild case and pass it on to kill someone’s grandparents. Then it’s deadly dumb.

Not believing that we need to do something to address climate change won’t make any difference in our lives. We could even join Montanans for Climate Change, hoping that winters for us old Montana people will get so warm we won’t even think about Arizona, and we will have beach front property on the other side of the Big Belt Mountains. Of course, hundreds of millions will die all over the world in the future if nothing is done, but we will be gone by then, so who cares?

What are we having for dessert tonight, Pat? Tomatoes? Really? Don’t try to confuse me with facts. Judging by my lack of action on doing my part pushing for action on climate change and overcoming anti-vax fears, I’m not that different from the science deniers. I have met the enemy and he is me.

Yesterday was National Grammar Day, which probably explains all the fireworks and horn honking last night. It is the day when we say hooray for Martha Brockenbrough. She was the founder of SPOGG (the Society for the Promotion Of Good Grammar). To be literal, the acronym should have been TSFTPOGG, but that doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily.

Martha and SPOGG got National Grammar Day established in 2008. President George W. Bush sent out a letter extolling the day, which is a little bit funny, given his tenuous connection to the language. A laugh riot would have been ex-President Trump doing the same. He wouldn’t know his grammar if she slapped him in the face.

I celebrated at our house yesterday by correcting Pat’s grammar once, which didn’t get us in a very festive mood. How can a guy be right and still be terribly wrong at the same time? That should have been in the dumb questions blog.

Grammar used to be part of one of my jobs. I was a Deputy Secretary of State in charge of Administrative Rules and Notaries Public. I can visualize you turning green with envy.

Debra was the Rules Queen and Cinda was the Rules Princess back then. I was their nominal supervisor. They would have wonderful arguments with each other about grammar and would occasionally include me since I am an English major. One of my daughters gave me a t-shirt that read “I’m silently correcting your grammar.” I couldn’t wear it at work, because the job of Administrative Rules was to correct the grammar of every other state agency proposing rules, and we weren’t silent about it. We should have had t-shirts reading “Administrative Rules Rules.” Sometimes Debra and Cinda would correct the posters that others put up at work.

I don’t think they ever explicitly told agencies “Whenever you make a plural by using an apostrophe, a puppy dies,” but they talked about doing it.

You may not think I know grammar because the Friday Good News contains so many grammatical mistakes. Especially sentence fragments. Or beginning a sentence with “or.” It’s on purpose, I tell you, in order to sound like speech rather than writing. (The speech of a person who doesn’t know grammar.)

It’s not that I don’t know better. My mother corrected us children frequently and taught us all the correct use of the tenses of “lie” and “lay,” and to not split infinitives. Oops.  I still try to observe the “Oxford comma,” which is the second comma in a series of three items. The comma after puppies in the sentence “The bag held bunnies, puppies, and alligators” is the Oxford comma. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that. You’re just pulling my leg now.

On Grammar Day, grade-schoolers chant, “Let’s eat, grandma. Grammar saves lives.” The higher grades chant, “A simile is like a metaphor.”

My mother would approve of elevating the discourse. My father’s grammar was fair, because it had to be. Granted, he talked about the boy in his geometry class studying the area of a circle. When asked to explain what A= πr² means (for us English types, that’s pronounced “A equals pie r squared”), the boy replied, “That means the equation is wrong. Pie are round. Cake are squared.” That joke is as old as pie, cake, and grammar. Did you notice the proper use of the Oxford comma in that last sentence? No? Do I have to send my mother to your house?

That takes us far afield from the main point. The erosion of good grammar is responsible for accelerating hard drug use, the refusal to wear masks, climate change, and the erosion of democracy in the US. By the way, the comma after the Oxford comma in that previous sentence is called the Rocky Mountain College comma. See, you’ve learned something already.

Grammar is a set of conventions on which all the educated speakers of a language agree. It governs our linguistic endeavors, which in turn control our ability to think. Once the grammatical structures of a society start slipping, anything goes. If we the people can’t use the various tenses of “lie” and “lay” properly, is it any wonder that falsehoods and sexual innuendo pervade every part of the media. You may need to read that last sentence again.

Did you know that good grammarians believe that Donald Trump’s inability to speak or write correctly presaged all the other ills of the last four years? I just made that up, but it’s probably true.

Now that we know whom to blame and why, I hope you won’t be asking me to sign a good-grammar pledge to keep me from trashing up the Friday Good News in my vain attempt to appear to be one of the masses. Ain’t gonna happen. The only people who really appreciate bad grammar are those of us who know most of the rules and can relish when we violate them. Not to mention my mother, who will not like being included in this sentence fragment, nor in the implication that she ever deliberately used bad grammar unless she were acting in a play. She would do it, but she wouldn’t like it.

But, you can’t blame me for everything from climate change to apathy about defeating lying politicians because of my shady grammar. I know what’s right. Mostly, but just don’t do it. Oops. I suppose that’s what most of us say about everything wrong with our country.

As we age, we change the dumb questions that we ask. As children, we asked questions like “Why is the sky blue?” and “Why is there war?” and “Why don’t the rich people just share with the poor people so nobody would be hungry?” They are dumb questions only because adults don’t know a good answer.

As children get older, their dumb questions get harder, so we parents resort to tried-and-true answers like “Because I said so.” This is usually every bit as satisfactory as the answers we gave to “Why is there war?”

In an attempt to get children and youth to ask questions, teachers often maintain that there is no such thing as a dumb question. Asking is essential for learning.

Of course, the teachers are not completely correct. These are dumb questions we ask at a later age:

Do Roman paramedics refer to IV’s as “4’s”?

What do people in China call their good plates?

Why do people tell you when they are speechless?

What happens if you’re half-scared to death, twice?

Do television evangelists do more than laypeople?

We used to live in a science-based world in which questions had actual answers based on what we used to call “facts.” This led to college science students chanting, “What do we want? Facts. When do we want them? After peer review.”

Now in America, facts are no longer facts. If you don’t like the concept of climate change, you simply say, “I don’t believe it.” If you don’t like the outcome of an election, “I don’t believe it.” This is much easier then trying to ascertain what corresponds to reality.

If there are no more actual answers that apply to everyone, then are there any dumb questions anymore? Yes, that was one.

The wrong dumb question can bring even dumber answers.

For instance, one really dumb question is “If people in bars consume alcohol that makes many people both dumber and more violent, how can we make bars safer?”

That is a particularly dumb question to ask when a Republican-controlled legislature is in town, because they gave the answer and our Republican governor agreed. Make them safer by allowing everyone to carry a concealed weapon into any bar (or bank or college campus or government building) without any training or licensing of any kind.

That was the story on the front page of the Helena IR today. Democrats voted no. Republican proponents of the bill really said every place would be safer. Really dumb questions can lead to deadly dumb answers from people untethered from facts.

Don’t you long for the good old days when we had dumb questions like

“Should I tell my parents I’m adopted?”

Or, if you are a member of QAnon, “Did NASA invent thunderstorms to cover up the sound of space battles?”

We live in a time when the former President accomplished what no other nation has done since the British took over our Capitol building in the War of 1812. It is amazing what a person with a bully pulpit can do if he repeats lies over and over.

We also live in a time when that same person and his minions did what no other nation could do. The nation with the best medical research and the most money in the world became the clear world leader in deaths from Covid19. Lies were once again essential for gaining the top spot.

I won’t lie to you. I long for a simpler time when on Valentine’s Day you tried to come up with silly love poems to put all depressing thoughts out of your head.

I haven’t written poetry in quite a long time, but I assume it’s like riding a bicycle. If you do it in traffic, you can be seriously injured. When writing, you have to wait until the words well up from your subconscious source of creativity. That’s my excuse for the following:

Complaint of the Suitor Who Doesn’t Know When to Keep His Hands to Himself

I love your eyes, they shine like stars.
I love your mouth like chocolate bars.
I love your ears like ocean shells.
I love your nose, the way it smells.

I love your heart, it beats ba-boom,
I love your curves, say va-va-voom.
I love your charm, your style, your grace,
But not your hands that slap my face.

Two points: 1. That isn’t autobiographical. 2. The amazing Amanda Gorman is not worried that I will be appointed the first geezer poet laureate.

Hey, it is -15° outside right now, and it takes a little time to warm up your subconscious creativity center. I relaxed and my subconscious coughed up another hairball.

Beware of Cupid
On Valentine’s Day near our house you might see
A short naked dude with a bow and some arrows.
Just give him a wave, for he surely must be
The drunk two blocks down who’s out hunting for sparrows.

Will Pat love me more than she already does if I give her these poems? I didn’t think so. Maybe I’m too old for this sort of thing. I’ll have to dust off one I wrote a couple of years ago when I was much younger. It’s worth a try.

When Patty Smiles
When Patty smiles, the chickadees
All giggle and they slap their knees.
Bird snickers fill the morning breeze,
When Patty smiles.

When Patty laughs, the flowers bloom,
The sun breaks through the clouds of gloom,
And joy plays tag from room to room,
When Patty laughs.

When Patty hugs, I’m near to tears
Of gratitude. My heart still cheers —
She loves me after all these years!
When Patty hugs.

Maybe she’ll still be my valentine, even though I’m going to lose my poetic license.

Don’t you long for the good old days? I mean the wonderful years of, say, ten or twelve years ago. The only talk of virus was “Did you get your flu shot?” If some individual attacked school children because they spoke out as survivors of mass murder at their school, and if that individual called them “actors” who made it all up, then such a sick individual was called “wacko” or “deeply disturbed,” rather than “Representative.”

Those were good times when the loser of the electoral college vote, whether Republican or Democrat, graciously conceded to the winner, even if the loser had obtained more total popular votes in the nation. Those were times when protecting the constitution meant abiding by the constitution and the laws of the land, rather than using lies to stir up millions of domestic terrorists to try to overturn the election by killing the opposition.

As I was deleting ancient computer files yesterday, I ran across a Friday Good News I wrote back in July of 2008. It has nothing to do with national or international problems. What a simple column from a simpleton writer in simpler times. Here it is.

July 27, 2008 Friday Good News

Good news doesn’t have to be good. It can just be “not bad.” With that in mind, consider how much better you are doing than:

Phillip Boucher, who gunned his Buick LeSabre to try to cross the rising drawbridge in St. Catherine’s, Ontario, and he almost made it.

Mara Ranger of Gorham, Maine, who can be seen on the CNN front web page as an eight-foot python is pulled from her washing machine.

James Kevin Pope, of Weatherford, Texas, who was convicted on 40 counts of sexual assault on three teenage girls and sentenced to 40 consecutive life sentences or 4060 years. He will be eligible for parole in 3209.

An unidentified Mesa, Arizona man, picked up by the police when neighbors called in about a violent domestic dispute. Police found only the one man, arguing with himself and changing his voice from high to low as he switched parts, all the while breaking windows and furniture in the apartment.

David Gebhart of Manchester, Connecticut, while wearing a thong, a wig and a brassiere was picked up by police because pedestrians are not allowed on the interstate.

Carol Greta, lawyer for the Iowa Department of Education, who had to defend publicly the department’s decision to throw out applications from 30 districts for preschool grants because “they weren’t double-spaced,” as stated in the instructions. Among the discarded applications was one from Danville which the superintendent claimed was double-spaced in Apple Works, which appears smaller when viewed with Microsoft Word.

Unless some of these are your relatives, you can relax, knowing that you’ve got it good this Friday. Rusty

February 5, 2021: Wouldn’t it be fine if those were the only shocking news headlines now?

Good news? We survived the pandemic so far, except for 400,000+ of us and about 3000 more every day. We live in the nation with perhaps the most advanced medical and research facilities in the world, but when you choose bad leaders, you get to be the worst nation in the world for handling the COVID. It is our own fault.

As a bonus, those same leadership qualities in the people we elected caused America to cease being the leader of the free world. We demeaned our allies, cozied up to dictators, and became the laughingstock of the whole world — democracies and authoritarian countries alike. Our bad.

Good news? Comedians all over the world came up with some great routines. Here is comedy from the Netherlands. I hope this link works.

Good news? As stupid as we are as a nation, we had enough sense to elect somebody better. We still came within an eyelash of having a loser of a president take over the country by lies and encouraging violence. If he and his followers had been smarter, they could have killed everyone in Congress (and maybe the Supreme Court as well) and tried to establish a perpetual president. We pulled through, by the skin of our teeth, although democracy is still hanging in the balance when nearly half the nation doesn’t trust the free press, the courts, or the electoral system.

Really good news? Now we have a president who believes in science and in the advice of smart people instead of incompetent fools. We have a spectacular multiple-glass-ceiling-breaking vice-president. And, if the link below works, you can hear the kind of inspirational songs comedians are now doing:

Friends sometimes write to correct my misstatements in the Friday Good News. Last week I wrote that Trump was not the most racist president ever because some presidents owned slaves. My friend, Craig Wright, didn’t quarrel with my statement, but did some research on it.

That’s not surprising. Craig was the first sabermetrician (numbers guy) in baseball before there was such a name. After years with the Rangers, Dodgers, and work done for other teams, he retired to became arguably the best historian in baseball. More below about how you can subscribe to his “Pages from Baseball’s Past” if you love the sport.

Craig can tell a good baseball story. He is now famous for the incredible research he does on each story, often unearthing pictures or facts not previously known, and often pointing out errors in other baseball sources, such as plaques in the Hall of Fame.

Craig didn’t argue with me, but did some research he usually reserves for baseball. Here is what Craig wrote about presidents and slaves:

”Personal involvement with slavery was much more commonplace among our US Presidents, and for a longer period of time, than most folks realize.

“Our first President George Washington was a huge slave owner, owning about 600, roughly the same as Thomas Jefferson. In his will George provided for all of them to be set free when his widow passed. She did not wait for that event and freed them a year after George’s death.

“Owning slaves seemed to be a great way to win a second term as President. Through 1837, the only Presidents who did not own slaves were my cousins John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, and they were also the only Presidents through that time to serve a single term.

“While JQ Adams never owned slaves and said he would not have it in his own family, he did tolerate slavery in his household, including during his time in the White House. Members of his wife’s family were slave owners and even when they stayed for lengthy times with the Adams, they were allowed to bring a slave servant. A slave servant of his brother-in-law died while staying at the White House.

“When JQ’s wife’s niece Mary was orphaned, she was taken in by the Adams and came with an inherited slave companion, Rachel Clark, of roughly the same age. Rachel remained a slave in Mary’s first 8 to 10 years with the Adams. Mary appeared to get with the program in 1828 when she officially joined the family by marrying the middle son, John Adams II. On the day of the wedding she freed her slave companion. Given the specificity of the timing, this may have been required of Mary to become an Adams. Otherwise the marriage would have turned JQ’s son into a slaveowner.

 “Technically, one could say the Adams were the only Presidents who had never owned a slave all the way through 1850.

 “Martin Van Buren (1837-1841) is generally not counted as a slave owner, but he actually did own a single slave. Tom escaped around 1814 and lived free for ten years before being discovered in Massachusetts by an Alonzo Hammond. Alonzo wrote to Van Buren that he would like to capture Tom and buy him from Van Buren.  Van Buren wrote back that if Tom could be captured without violence “I would take $50” for him. That’s a slave owner. Thankfully it appears the two men were not able to reach an agreement and Tom stayed free, though technically still property.

“Van Buren also employed hired slave servants during his time in Washington D.C., a common practice in the city where the “wages” went directly to the slave’s owner. It was hard sometimes to tell who was who, as census records showed that his “colored” servants were a mixture of hired free people and hired slave servants.

“ William Henry Harrison (1841) did not own a single slave during his Presidency, but he had owned many slaves in his past and was clearly pro-slavery. When he was governor of the Indiana Territory he had sought to legalize slavery in Indiana. He also chose a strong advocate of slavery in his running mate John Tyler, who became President when Harrison died in office. Tyler was not only a lifelong slave owner but a proponent of expanding slavery into the new territories.

 “It wasn’t all the way until Millard Fillmore (1850-1853) that we had a President outside the Adams family who had never owned a slave. Fillmore incidentally was the last president who wasn’t of the Democratic or Republican parties.

“The last President who had owned a slave was Ulysses Grant. His wife came into the marriage with four slaves, and Ulysses briefly owned a personal slave that was hard to turn down because he was a gift from his father-in-law. It was still more than Grant could abide and he freed the man less than two years later, early in 1859. His wife freed the other four slaves in 1863, about a year before her husband was named General-in-Chief of the whole union army (Mar 9, 1864).

In total, twelve Presidents were slave owners at some time in their lives. So, it wasn’t until William McKinley, whose term took us into the 20^th century, that we could say that the majority of our Presidents had never owned a slave!”                                                 Craig Wright

Rusty here again: If you are a baseball fan or know someone who is, here is a Christmas present suggestion. For only $21 for a yearly subscription to Pages from Baseball’s Past, you or someone else can receive a couple of great baseball stories in your email each week. Here are some websites and a couple of reviews by Craig’s readers. Enjoy:

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