Note—This annual chestnut is back!  But this year the observations are muted by true horror—the mounting death tolls of the Coronavirus pandemic.  Trick or Treating is iffy or banned in many places.  Bars are closed in Illinois and elsewhere.  We are advised not to let anyone in our homes who do not live there for parties.

Halloween traces its origin to the Celtic harvest festival Samhain.  It was one of the four festivals that fell between the Solstices and Equinoxes and which celebrated the natural turning of the seasons.  Samhain was particularly important because it was the gate in time to the death and starvation season of winter, as well a time to celebrate the recent harvest. 

This association with the death of winter also extended to the spirit world, which was considered to be closer to the mortal plane than at any other time of the year.  The Celtic priests—the Druids—marked the occasion with the lighting of bonfires and with gifts of food and drink for the spirits of the dead.  Some consider it also analogous to a New Year’s Celebration launching a new cycleof the seasons.  It was popularly celebrated by the peasantry long after the Druids passed and well into the Christian era.

Too popular to squelch, as with many paganobservances Catholic Church co-opted the custom as All Saints Day on November 1.   In rural regions especially Samhain customs continued to be observed on the evening before the Holy Day—which came to be known as All Hallows Eve, or Hallowe’en in Scots.

Immigrants from the British Islesbrought some of their customs with them to the New World, but Halloween does not seem to have been widely celebrated colonial America.  The Puritans spent a lot of time trying to squelchother pagan customs like the May Pole dances associated with the spring Celtic festival of Beltane, but for all of their obsession with witchcraft, usually associated with those who continued to keep the old pagan traditions, there is no evidence of suppressing Samhain or Halloween.

In fact there is little mention of Halloween in America until the second half of the 19th Century.  By the 1880’s and ‘90’s greeting card companies were printing colorful post cards featuring images of witches, black cats, skeletons, and pumpkin Jack o’ Lanterns—all of the classic images associated with Halloween.  Period photos from around the turn of the 20th Century show both adultsand children in costumes, most commonly some variation of witch or ghost themes.   

A few scattered newspapers began reporting ritual begging on Halloween by masked youths accompanied by general hooliganism, threats, and acts of vandalism.  This was probably introduced by the wave of poor “country” Irish immigrants that began after the Potato Famine and continued through most of the rest of the century.  The ritual begging in costumes and general hooliganism more closely resembled rural Irish Wren Day—St. Stephen’s DayDecember 26—customs than those celebrated in either England or Scotland.

Rowdyism by boys and young men was reported in big cities and small towns alike and often included setting small bonfires of junk in roadways; tipping or stealing outhouses; pelting houses with eggs, rotten vegetables, or manure; letting horses and livestock loose from barns and pens; and sometimes blocking chimneys so that houses would fill with smoke.  Sometime significant damage was done.  The Halloween scene in the classic MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis shows a rare screen glimpse at the rowdy shenanigans most Americans associated with the celebration.

As it spread, customs for observing the holiday varied regionally. Communities started to organize activities to keep the kids and hooligans off the streets, with mixed success.  Parties with games such as bobbing for apples and the telling of ghost stories were fairly common. 

Animated films of the ‘20’s and ‘30’s such as Walt Disney’s 1929 Silly Symphony The Dancing Skeletons showed the popularity of the holiday and light-hearted images of death, witches, and black cats.  The Skeletons perhaps show a tip-o’-the-hat familiarity with the Mexican customs around The Day of the Dead which is celebrated on All Soul’s Day.

The custom of trick or treating seems to have spread slowly.  It combined the ritual begging with toned-downtricks that were a little less extreme than the wild rampages reported earlier.  What progress it was making was largely interrupted by the Depressionyears when families had little extra money to spend on treats and by the sugar rationing of World War II.

Trick or treating was still far from universal until after World War II when it became a topic of popular radio programslike the Jack Benny Show and Ozzie and Harriet. 

In 1947 the popular children’s magazineJack and Jill published a story on the custom of Halloween begging and described it in detail, spreading the practice widely and with amazing uniformity.  By 1951 the practice was wide spread enough that a Philadelphiawoman, Mary Emma Allison and the Reverend Clyde Allison decided to channel the energy to constructive purposes by introducing Trick or Treat for UNICEF to support the work of the United Nations international children’s relief.

By the mid 1950’s with the strong support of the candy companies and the introduction of cheap masks and pajama style costumes for children, the practice of trick or treating had become ubiquitous and had even taken on a feeling of a long standing practice.

What started with ghost stories and the like, soon spread to all types of horror, and fueled by the growing popularity of increasingly violent Hollywood films.  Gore became and more and more common theme and showing horror films for the whole month of October in theaters and on TV was standard by the early 1970’s.

About the same time the first generations of trick or treaters grew up but continued to enjoy the dress-up and parties of Halloween.  It is, year by year, an increasingly popular adult holiday, incorporating many of the features of various world masquerade festivals with macabre twist.

Halloween is now the second most widely celebrated holiday in the United States and is an economic powerhouse, generating sales second only to Christmas.  Popular American media have spread the customs of trick or treating and celebrating gore around the world, often supplanting truly ancient celebrations of Halloween in the Celtic countries.

The resurgence of Christian Fundamentalismin the U.S. has led to a counter movement to strip the “Satanic” festival from public schools and the wider community.  Although they get it wrong—there was never any connection between Satanism and Halloween—the Fundies, ironically, at least recognized a religious tradition hiding under the commercial hoopla. 

At the same time re-invented“traditional” paganism like Wicca, one of the most rapidly growing religious movements of the last decades, has striven to recapture the nearly lost significance of the holiday’s roots in Samhain—and sometime invented traditions on flimsy or non-existent evidence.

Go thou, and celebrate as thou wouldst.   

It’s hard to believe that it has already been 15 years since October 24, 2005 when Rosa Parks died in Detroit, Michigan at the age of 93.  She is revered as the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement for sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycottby refusing to give her seat to a white man.  A young ministernamed Martin Luther King, Jr. was selected to lead the long campaignthat led to one of the first great victories in for the Civil Rights Movement in the South.

After her death that year, she was widely celebratedincluding the then unheard of honorfor a woman and private citizen who never held high civil or military officeof being laid in state in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol.  Tens of thousands filed silently by her flag draped coffin on October 31—Halloween.

I was inspired to write a poem by news coverage of the solemn event. With unwarranted audaciousness, I chose to write in her voice.  I had recently listened to some extended interviews and could clearly hear her soft, breathy tone and gentle Southern accent in my head.  I knew then, and I know now, that there will be some that take great offense—particularly because I have her voice commentsabout crime and young men in her troubled Detroit neighborhood.  But I had also heard her make similar comments in life.

I have read this work several times and it has appeared in this blog before.  But it seems an apt moment to revisit it.

Rosa Parks on Halloween 2005

I didn’t hold truck with Halloween.

I was a good Christian woman.

Ask anyone who ever knew me,

            they will tell you so.

Back in Detroit young fools,

            with pints and pistols

            in their back pockets

            burned the neighborhood

            each Halloween.

Hell Night they called it

            and it was.

Heathen business, I say.

I passed on a few days ago.

Time had whittled me away.

Small as I was to begin with,

            I had no weight left

            to tie me to the earth.

Now I lay in a box on cold marble.

The empty dome of the Capital

            pretends to be heaven above.

A river of faces turns around me,

            gawking, weeping, murmuring.

I see them all.

Maybe those old Druids,

            pagan though they were,

            were right about the air

            between the living and the dead

            being thin this day.

More likely that Sweet Chariot

            has parked somewhere

            and let me linger a while

            just so I could see this

            before swinging low

            to carry me home.

It makes me proud alright.

I was always proud.

Humility before the Lord

            may be a virtue,

            but humility before the master

            was the lash that kept

            Black folks down.

We grew pride as a back bone.

All of this is nice enough.

But let me tell you,

            since I’ve been gone,

            I’ve seen some foolishness

            and heard plenty, too.

They talk all kinds of foolishness

            about that day in Montgomery.

All that falderal about my feet being tired.

It wasn’t my soles that ached.

It was my soul.

It wasn’t any sudden accident either.

No sir, I prayed at the AME church.

I went to the Highland School

            for rabble rousers and trouble makers.

I met with the brothers at the NAACP

            who were a little afraid

            of an uppity woman.

Another thing.

That day was not my whole life.

There were 42 years before

            and fifty more after.

There was plenty of loving and grieving,

            sweat and laughter,

            and always speaking my mind

            very plainly, thank you.

Sure, there were parades.

There were medals and speeches, too.

But there were also long lonely days.

Once, up in Detroit,

            I was beat half to death

            in my own home

            by a wild eyed thug.

He didn’t care if I was

            the Mother of Civil Rights.

He never heard of Dr. King

            or the bus boycott.

All he wanted was my Government money.

            so he could go out

            and hop himself up some more.

That a young Black man

            could do that to an old woman,

            any old woman,

            near broke my heart.

That I could step out my door           

            and see copies of him

            lolling on every street corner

            made me mad.

We may have changed the world,

            like they kept saying.

We didn’t change it enough.

We didn’t keep the hope from

            being sucked out of the city.

This business in the Capital    

            is alright, I suppose.

And it was nice enough to be brought

            back to Montgomery, too,

            laid out in the chapel

            of my home church.

But clearly some folks have

            gone out of their minds.

Why, in Houston the other day,

            before a World Series game,

            they had the crowd stand silent

            in my memory.

It was a sea of white faces

            who paid a seamstress’s

            wages for a month for a seat.

It seems the only Black faces

            were on the field

            or roaming the aisles

            selling hot dogs.

And, Lord, the two-faced politicians

            that came out of the woodwork!

The governor of Alabama

            cried crocodile tears

            as if he would not be

            happy to have

            a White Citizen’s Council

            membership card in his wallet

            if it would get him some votes.

Somebody roused George W. from his stupor,

            told him in short easy words

            who I was,

            and shoved him out

            in front of the microphones

            to eulogize me.

He looked uncomfortable and confused.

I understand he had other things

            on his mind.

What these politicians had in mind

            was patting black folks on the head.

“See,” they say, “Mrs. Parks and Dr. King

            took care of everything.

They asked for freedom and we gave it to them

            a long, long time ago.

What more can you ask?

Now stand over there out of the way

            so we can get down to the business   

            of going after real money.”

It plain tires me out.

Little children, Black and white,

            who study me in school,

            do not think the job is over.

Your own bus seat must be won every day.

And while you are at it,

            have the driver change the route.

—Patrick Murfin

One Fall day back in 2014 I was stumped for a blog post.  Everything I found either bored me or would require such an enormous effort at research and probably turn into one of those things that runs to 6,000 words.  I know that no one reads those posts unless a blood relative is the subject.  Sometime I do them anyway if the topic interests me, but I always regret it.  Anyway, both stumped and unmotivated.  So I lay idly on a couch for an hour or so, turning my old brown felt hat over and over in my hand closely examining the damning evidence of long hard usage.  After a while I said to myself—aloud because the house was empty—“I may as well just write about the damn thing!”  Five minutes later I was pounding out the ode below.

Once again, I have nothing better to offer, so here it is again.

The hat in question was a Christmas gift from my wife Kathy in 2001.  I was in desperate need of a new dress lid.  My everyday work hat was an Indiana Jones style brown fedora I had acquired in the mid-80’s and re-creased into my favored style with a peaked center ridge pinched on either side and the brim slouched.  I wore it every day to work as a head building custodian in Cary, Illinois and to whatever second job I held—at the time a second shift gas station clerk  at a Crystal Lake Mobile.  It was battered, sweat stained, filthy, and looked like it had been run over by a garbage truck.

The trouble was my current dress hat was not in much better shape, even though it was a much higher quality sombrero.  It was a nice silver belly Stetson XXX Open Road.  I had likewise reshaped it but with it higher crown  and a broader brim bound with a ribbed silk ribbon it had once gleamed spectacularly atop my head.  It was then only five years old but because of  it its light color now looked grimy and dingy.  A hole was even emerging from the front of the peak where I grabbed the hat between my thumb and forefingers to take off and on.  It clearly no longer qualified as my dress hat and Kathy was embarrassed to be seen with me in either hat.  She was a motivated giver.

Kathy spotted the hat on sale during a Christmas shopping expedition we made to Springhill Mall, the closest big merchandising Mecca in a still bustling Sears.  Later, when we split up to check out other stores in the Mall, she doubled back and bought it then hid it somehow in the car.  It was a light brown, soft felt with a low, flat crown and a wide brim.  It had a narrow, light beige suede band that had not been well cut—it varied in width from here to there.  It was a then popular style of an exaggerated fedora with an extra wide brim, but was on the low end of the quality scale.  She paid about $15 for her prize.

When I opened her present on Christmas morning, I was a bit skeptical.  I had never worn a hat with that low a crown.  It would not hold my attempts to re-crease it in my favored center peak.  It would just pop back into shape.  The damn hat had a will of its own.  It would not be anything other than how it was made.  Sigh.  But I needed a hat, so I put it to work.

A week after Christmas it got it’s baptism of activism, when I wore it to a small New Year’s Day peace vigil organized  by the American Friends Service Committee—the Quakers—by winter dormant Buckingham Fountain.  Kathy and I met my former sister-in-law Arlene Brennan and her husband Michael, my nephew Ira S. Murfin and a girl he knew who was on her way to a winter job shooing bison back into Yellowstone Park to keep them from being shot by Montana ranchers.  It was the first of scores of vigils, marches, rallies, and demonstrations over the next 16 years at which I wore the hat.  Paired with a trench coat, it went with me to a giant anti-war march in Washington, D.C. later that January and sheltered my head through weekly roadside vigils that the McHenry County Peace Group kept up over the next two and a half years through all sorts of inclement weather.

The hat and I at the Haymarket monument in Chicago one May Day after I led a Labor service at a U.U. Congregation.

When I wrote and posted my poem six years ago, the old chapeau was still in daily service.  Today it has been demoted to rough duty status.  Although it has held its shape remarkably well and resists  popping holes  at pressure points—which eventually dooms my higher quality Stetsons—the fading and sweat stains can no longer be ignored.  I no longer wear it for regular daily use to unless there is heavy rain—its broad brim makes it the best rain hat I ever had.  It also holds up well when it is snowing so hard it measurably accumulates on the brim.  I still throw it on for yard work, snow shoveling, or and when I walk the dog.

The old brown hat has been replaced for everyday use by a grey Bailey’s U-Roll-It that I picked up in Sheridan, Wyoming back in 2009.  It is very different from the old one—curled brim with the front slouched down and a higher crown.  It is showing its age too, but is still serviceable for the general running around of a retired geezer.

For Christmas two years ago Kathy got me another new dress hat.  This one is very nice but black, a hat color I had never worn.  I break it out for our dinner dates at better places, to go to the theater, and for a few special occasions.  Most of those opportunities are on hold due to  Coronavirus precautions. I have to keep the new hat in a tightly closed plastic bag because each speck of dust stands out against the black.

Anyway, here is my ode to an old hat.

When You Wear a Hat as Long as This One

When you wear a hat as long as this one—

            you know, the old brown one

            with the broad flat brim

            and low crown,

            the one Kathy bought you for Christmas

            the holiday after 9/11—

you learn to understand that the Universe

            is falling down upon you day after day

            that stardust, ashes, and cat dander

            sift unseen and constant

            day after day,

            year after year,

            one decade into the next

drifting into the creases of the crown,

            balling just a tad if you rub your

            thumb or fingers across the brim

            which has subtly changed color

            under the weight

nothing to be done about it

            the heaviest downpour does not

            wash it away,

            nor can you brush it,

            or beat it against your leg,

the stuff clings to the fine wool fibers

            of the soft felt

            and where the sweat and

            oil from your dirty hair

            touch it, it becomes a little hard

            and shiny

and the old band twisted and stained

            must be covered by one braided from

            bright fabrics somewhere in Nicaragua

            and even that band is faded and

            dusted in its folds and knots,

and the universe continues to fall unconcerned.

—Patrick Murfin

Quick quiz.  What woman won more Academy Awards than any other?  Meryl Streep your say?  Wrong.  Katherine Hepburn.  Nope.  Sally Field.  Don’t be ridiculous.  The woman with eight, count ‘em eight Oscars was not an actress at all but a diminutive woman turned out for decades in enormous round glasses, black Moe Howard bangs, tasteful two piece suites, and a take-no-prisoners attitude.

Who else but costume designer to the stars,Edith Head.

Edith Claire Posener was born on October 28, 1897—although she would later claim 1902, a date which still shows up in articles based on her Hollywood press clippings—in San Bernardino, California.  It was not a place she called home.  Indeed she never had a real hometown.  Her father, Max Posener, was a Russian Jewish emigrant and her mother, Anna E. Levy, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of German/Austrian Jews.  In the pecking order of Jewish society in America, they were mismatched.  It is likely Anna’s parents disapproved of the match and the couple eloped, or simply ran away since there is no evidence they ever married.

Max disappeared when Edith was small after a haberdashery he managed to open in San Bernardino failed.  A year later, in 1905 Anna married Frank Spare, a young Catholic engineer.  They were soon passing Edith off as their mutual daughter and she was raised a Catholic.   Her stepfather’s profession made the family virtual nomads has he found work in mining camps around the West.  The family stayed longer in Searchlight, Nevada than most towns.

Frank did earn a nice living an indulged his daughter in a first rate education.  Edith graduated with a B.A. and honors in French from the University of California at Berkley in 1919 and earned her Master’s in Romance Languages from Stanford a year later.

Then she was on her own in the world.  She started as a French teacher, first in a parochial school in La Jolla and then at the Hollywood School for Girls, a prestigious finishing school catering to the daughters of the booming movie business. In order to qualify for higher pay, she volunteered to teach art as well as French despite having no lessons in the subject since high school. 

Edith’s drawing skills were extremely limited so she enrolled for night classes at the Chouinard Art College.  While there she met Charles Head, the brother of a classmate.  They were married in the summer of 1923.  It was not a particularly happy marriage and the couple separatedafter a few years.  They did not divorce, however until 1934, presumably because of Edith’s Catholicism.  They had no children, but she gained the name she used throughout her professional life.

In 1924, bored with the life of a housewife in search of a good income, Edith naturally turned to the main local industry for work.  Despite absolutely no experiencein fashion or design and still limited in drafting skills, she applied to Paramount Pictures for work as a costume sketch artist under the direction of studio designers.  To get the job she submitted a portfolio borrowed from another student.  Not the last time she would finesse her career by cutting corners here and there.

                         A rare shot of a young Edith Head sans glasses from her early days at Paramount.

Head, however, was a quick study.  Her drawing improved, and she began making suggestions.  Within a year she was designing for her first picture, The Wanderer, a Raoul Walsh film starring German actress Greta Nissen and Wallace Berry.  She soon became a Walsh favorite, the first of several directors who championed her career.

At first she toiled in the shadows of Paramount’s head designers, first Howard Greer, then Travis Banton both of who, as was the custom, would often claim her work as their own for screen credits.  It was a “tradition” Head continued after she got the top job long after it was both out of fashion and professionally frowned on, for which she would get a lot of criticism from fellow designers.

But within the studio, Heads work was championed not only by directors, but by leading ladies who appreciated her habit of consulting with them on her design to accommodate  when possible their taste and to accentuate their best features.  Most designers took a take-it-or-leave it attitude with actresses except for the handful of stars with real clout within the studio system.

Although she had enjoyed some studio publicity over the years, Head did not attract wide spread public attentionuntil she put Dorothy Lamour in that famous sarong in 1937’s John Ford epic The Hurricane.  The dress made Lamour a star—Head kept her in versions of it in the subsequent Bring Crosby/Bob Hope road pictures—and Edith a celebrity. 

Dorothy Lamour's sarong was a break-out look.

And she would keep an iron grip on the job for 29 more years.

Paramount was toward the rear of the pack of Hollywood Major Studios, much smaller than the relentless factory at MGM which produced as many as 200 pictures a year at its peak, or Warner Bros.  home of gritty urban dramas, women’s movies, and prestige bio-flicks.  In either of those she would have had to compete with rafts of designers to get the top assignments.  Paramount, on the other hand, made 20 or 30 features a year with a relatively thin stable of stars.  Head got her hand on any project she desired, and had time to frequently go on loan to other studios at the bequest of stars or directors she had cultivated.  By the 1940’s “Costumes by Edith Head” seemed a ubiquitous credit.

In that decade she left her impression on many stars and memorable films including Paulette Goddard in Cat and the Canary; Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels and I Married a Witch; Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire, and Double Indemnity; Ginger Rodgers in Lady in the Dark; Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, Loretta Young in The Farmer’s Daughter; and Bette Davis in June Bride.

Head’s star was rising, but she was not about to let studio publicity departments burry her contributions while hyping stars.  She made herself available for interviewsto key entertainment reporters and kept gossip columnists in her debt by occasionally feeding them juicy—but never career damaging—studio gossip and usually flattering bitson the stars she cultivated.  She contributed fashion articles to magazinesand staged costume shows for newsreels.  She even got Paramount to film a short documentary on her and her department.

Not that she was without critics, particularly among her fellow designers and those who toiled in studio wardrobe departments.  She had been an outspoken opponent of unionization by costume designers.  Always obsequious to authority, especially studio bosses, producers, and name directors, she could be a tyrant and taskmistress over the employees under her, quick to shift blame for failures and to claim credit for their work.  She defended the later by saying that their designs were always only executed at her guidance, direction, and inspiration. 

Others were critical of her style, particularly in modern dress pictures calling her the Shirtwaist Queen for her frequent use of that basic style.  But shirtwaists are flattering on most women’s bodies.  Moreover studio bosses were explicit that designs be a timeless as possible, shunning passing fashion trends, so that pictures could easily be re-released, a big money maker.  The result was a classic clean but elegantEdith Head style.

Head's design for Bette Davis's coctail party gown in All About Eve was among her most celebrated work.

In 1949 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences added the costume design to its annual Oscar Awards.  Beginning that year with The Emperor Waltz, a Bing Crosby musical co-starring Joan Fontaine, Head would be nominated for the next 19 consecutive years—sometimes  for multiple pictures in a year—and five more times after that with a total of 35 nominations.  Her eight trips home with the trophy were for The Heiress with Julie Harris, 1950; Samson and Delilah with Heddy Lamarr (color), 1951; All About Eve with Bette Davis and Anne Baxter (black and white), 1951; A Place in the Sun with Elizabeth Taylor and Shelly Winters, 1952; Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn, 1954; Sabrina, again with Hepburn, 1954; The Facts of Life with Lucile Ball, 1960; and The Sting in 1974.

Of those films, the award for Sabrina was the most controversial.  For the key sequences when Hepburn as the chauffeur’s daughter blossoms into a Paris model, the star personally picked sketches by designer Hubert de Givenchy.  The outfits were constructed in Head’s wardrobe department and she did design most of the American clothes.  She refused to give de Givenchy screen credit with her for design.   Although the award was obviously mostly for his contributions, Head accepted it anyway.

Head was now a major celebrity in her own right.  There were not yet famous American fashion houses, and outside of New York society hardly anyone knew the name of a haute couture American designer.  Only the great Paris fashion houses were known to the public.  For many ordinary American women, the highly visible Head was high fashion, not just costume design.  Knock-offmanufacturers kept Main Street dress shops across the country stocked with dresses and suits inspired by Head movies.

Even I, a pre-teen yahoo in Cheyenne, Wyoming knew who Edith Head was.  In those days we had a full hour for lunchat school and those who could, walked home to eat.  I did.  And everyday Mom had Art Linkletter’s House Party, a kind of stone age talk/variety program, on the TV.  Head made frequent, sometimes weekly, appearances on the show, on the show, often dishing out fashion advice to members of the audience.  At home, Mom paid strict attention.

She had now added Cecil B. DeMille, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock to her list of director champions and a galaxy of stars including Hepburn, Taylor, Baxter, Grace Kelly, and Natalie Wood as her devoted fans. 

Among her other screen triumphs in the ‘50’s and ‘60s were Sunset Boulevard with Gloria Swanson; Rear Window and It Takes a Thief with Kelly; White Christmas with Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen, Crosby, and Danny Kaye; The Man Who Knew too Much with Doris Day; the DeMille epic Ten Commandments; Witness for the Prosecution with Marlene Dietrich; Separate Tables with Rita Hayworth; Vertigo with Kim Novak; and That Kind of Woman with Sophia Loren.

Starting in 1963 with Love With a Proper Stranger through The Last Married Couple in America in 1980 Head made seven films with Natalie Wood.

Her last film for Paramount was the gaudy melodrama The Oscar, for which she naturally received another nomination for the statuette in 1967.  Then Head left her longtime home at Paramount and jumped to Universal, a studio on the rise since its days as the home of classic monster movies.  She followed Alfred Hitchcock there, the director with whom she worked most often. 

Head surrounded by sketches reflecting her long career in 1967.

Age and increasingly fragile health slowed her up some, but she could still pull out some claims to glory.  There were five more Oscar nominations including nods for the musical Sweet Charity,  the costume epic The Man Who Would Be King, and the disaster movies Airport and Airport ’77.  After years of gaining glory for designing for beautiful Hollywood clothes horses, her final years were marked by films centering on men, including her final Oscar win, The Sting.

She designed for Rooster Cogburn with John Wayne and Katherine Hepburn.  She also did work that evoked earlier years of Hollywood glory and her own screen work—Gable and Lombard with James Brolin and Jill Clayburgh, W.C. Fields and Me with Rod Steiger and Valerie Perrine, and Steve Martin’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.  The latter, released in 1981, captured the look of ‘40’s film noir.  Released after her death, Martin dedicated the film to her.

Head’s husband since 1940, set designer Wiard Ihnen died in 1979 of prostate cancer.  The couple had no children.  Although Head continued to work until the end, her health was bad.  She suffered from myelofibrosis, an incurable bone marrow disease.  She died on October 24, 1981 four days shy of her 84th birthday.  She was buried unostentatiously under a simple bronze plaque in a Catholic section of Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens removed from the flashy graves and mausoleums of the stars she had decorated. 

In recent years he was the subject of widely hailed three volume biography by Edmund Morris and several other books examining various parts of his multi-faceted life, studied in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s close examination of the Progressive era in The Bully Pulpit, portrayed by Tom Berenger in the TV miniseries Rough Riders, and was one of the three main charactersprofiled in Ken Burns’ epic 5 night PBS documentary series The Roosevelts. And last year one of my favorite novelists and Facebook connections Jerome Charyn got inside T.R.’s head in The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King.

But 40 years after Roosevelt’s death, he also grabbed the idolizing attention of a 10 year old nerd from Cheyenne, Wyoming.  I was already in the grips of fascination with history as a bespectacled, bookish kid with no friends when I first encountered passing notice of him in my entirely inadequate elementary school social studies text.  From there I checked him out in the illustrated Presidential biography books that I had already collected.  And my folkshad taken me to the Black Hills where I had seen Roosevelt’s visagesqueezed in between Jefferson and Lincoln on Mount Rushmore.  So I knew he was a big deal.

But what turned Roosevelt from a passing interest into an obsession was a Classics Illustrated   comic book The Roughrider.  The comic told the story of how young Theodore, the weakling asthmatic who was bullied and mocked for his myopia and thick glasses but who by dint of sheer grit and determination transformed himself into a Harvard boxer, South Dakota rancher, New York City Police Commissioner, war hero, and eventually President.  A particularly satisfying panel in the book depicted Roosevelt knocking out with one mighty blow a cowboy who mocked him as four eyes.  The boy Teddy reminded me a lot of me, likewise the brunt of ridicule and abuse.  The adult hero held out promise that it did not always have to be that way.

It was a short step from hero worshipto nutty obsession.  How so?  Let me count the ways.

The first thing was appearance.  The mustache stubbornly refused to rise from the fine blonde down on my upper lip.  Halloween costume fakes were all jet black, lacked the distinctive inward curlaround the sides of the mouth, and, well, looked like crap.  And I discovered that pince-nez glasses were not available at my local optician’s.  I was stuck with the clunky plastic faux tortoise shell frames fit for a middle aged accountant.  But I could get the hat right.

I started with a cheap gray felt hat I bought at a souvenir stand at Cheyenne Frontier Days.  It was supposed to be a Confederate hat and had a paper Stars and Bars Flag sticker on the front.  I was a loyal Union man and spent hours trying to get all vestiges of that peeled off.  The hat did have a satisfyingly military looking gold cord band with end tassels.  I pinned up one side with a brass US collar insignia from my Dad’s World War II uniform.  It made a satisfying reproduction of Col. Roosevelt’s famous Rough Rider campaign hat.

At first I decorated it with a long pheasant tail feather, but discarded that when I realized that no photo showed my beloved Teddy sporting such a plume.  I wore that increasingly batteredhat every single day from the moment I got out of bed to the time I turned in at night—except when required to remove it at school or church—for almost three years until it practically disintegrated and my head got too big.  Needless to say, I attracted a lot of gaping stares.  And the bullies were unimpressed by its martial appearance.

The hat was useful in the back yard fantasy games I played largely by myself.  None of the other neighborhood kids, least of all twin brother Tim who was running with a faster older crowd and already smoking cigarettes in their fort/club house, were interested in daily charges up San Juan Hill or whatever other adventures I could conjure.  My red and white Firestone coaster brake bicycle with the plastic streamers on the hand grips had to be my noble steed.

Alas, there are no extant photos of me in my Rough Rider hat, although I know that several were snapped on our old Kodak Brownie Box Camera.  My mom, likely out of shame and embarrassment, left them out of her meticulously maintained photo albums and they can’t even be located in the unsorted shoe boxes of old photos. 

School was a place where my obsession played out with a bit of drama.  I started handing in my homework, busy work Ditto activity sheets, quizzes, and tests with the correct day of the month underneath my name but instead of 1959 listing the year as 1905, the year after Roosevelt’s election to a full term on his own. I picked the year because the old movies I watched on TV when I got home from school painted that era as sunny, pleasant, and free from loomingnuclear annihilation—something that was constantly on our minds in Cheyenne where the Air Force was beginning to build the nation’s first ICBM missile baseand which, the civic boastproclaimed, would be a top target for Commie obliteration.  The movies, mostly musicals and comedies like Meet Me in St. Louis or Life With Father were all made in the ‘30’ and ‘40’s when many ticket buyers were of an age to recall those days with wistful nostalgia.  Most depicted the comfortable middle class in large homes with live-in servants.  It seemed to me that Teddy Roosevelt ruled over an ideal time to be alive.

So I decided that, come hell or high water, I would live then.  Neither my teachers, nor the Principal at Eastridge Elementary where I was routinely sent for an attitude adjustment, were amused by this quirk.  They demanded that I use the correct date and used every punishmentin their arsenal to compel my acquiescence.  For a while I was given an F (actually a 5 because Cheyenne Public Schools were then using an odd numerical grading system) on every paper I turned in with the wrong year.  But I was a student reading at the level of a senior in high School and in subjects like social studies and scienceshowed every evidence of complete mastery of the lessons.  Of course my spelling was atrocious, my hand writing cramped and nearly illegible, and I was too bored by arithmetic to bother with accurate computations and, it would be discoveredmuch later, was mildly dyslexiccompounding that problem.  Despite my wildly uneven academic performance, eventually it was decided that it was hopelessthe hold the date thing against my grades.  Besides, if the teachers kept it up, I would be held back for another year and they would be stuck with me again.

So they tried keeping me in for recess.  Hardly a punishment as it kept me from getting beat up on the playground and while the others were running around and screaming, I was happily alone in the class room partaking of my favorite activity—reading.  Keeping me after school was no skin off my nose either.  Things were not all that rosy at home where my Mom was battling mental health and rage issues and I was the number 1 object of her wrath and dissatisfaction with thehand life had dealt her.  Of course that also meant that when the school sent home notes complaining about my stubborn misdating, she took it as a purposeful disgrace to the family—the gravest of all possible offenses.  Then out would come the wire handle of the fly swatter, down would drop my jeans and underwear and my ass got whipped to hamburger.

None of it mattered.  I just kept entering that date, and dreaming of the time and place where nothing like that happened. 

The whole thing lasted almost three years until I entered Junior High School and just let it all slide for new dreams and obsessions, every bit as weird perhaps, but not as apt to draw notice. 

Then in a few more years I would discover the underside of 1905 and the Roosevelt utopia—the world of viciouscapitalist exploitation of working people, their resistance and rebellion, of open class war, Jim Crow, lynchings, and of nasty little imperialist wars.

But that’s another story…. 

Note—This week marks the second anniversary of the mass murder at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018.  I was asked to do the Chalice Lighting at the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry, which may have felt a special kinship with a congregation of the same name, the next day.    The topic for the morning was sanctuary.  I threw away what I had carefully prepared.  I was planning on reading this new poem instead which was totally inadequate to the situation but due to a scheduling mix up, I didn’t read it that day.   As you will see the poem also references other ugly, hateful episodes the same week but current outrages could easily be plugged in.

Sanctuary in a Very Bad Week

Headlines: 

Trump Attempts to Erase Transgender Identity

Two Blacks Killed at Walmart by Angry Racist

14 Bombs Sent to Targets Denounced by Trump

11 Dead at Tree of Life Synagogue Mass Murder

Sacred shelter—A haven offered or sought, 

   a holy obligation and a desperate resort.

The Church once offered it to those fleeing

   the wrath of a king or war lord.

Today we are called to offer it to

   immigrants and refugees,

      the homeless and unwanted,

            the despised of color, gender, faith,

               abused women and families,

                  all the wretched.

Know this—Sanctuary can fail.

   Ask Thomas Becket, Ann Frank,

      the four little Girls of Birmingham,

            the frozen bum,

               the murdered wife,

                  the deported asylum seeker,

         the immigrant children in cages,

            the dead Jews of Tree of Life.

But failure does not cancel hope or duty.

   time to step up,

      to take our chances,

            to become a People of Sanctuary.

—Patrick Murfin

Just after the U.S. set another grim record for the greatest number of Coronavirus deaths since the pandemic began.  The total death toll reached 224,000 with the possibility that number could nearly double again by the end of the year.  And just after Donald Trump dodged responsibility, babbled nonsense, and lied repeatedly in his final debate with Joe Biden a friend was added to the roster in Covid-19 ravaged Wisconsin.

But he was more than just a statistic.  Randal Jasper’s wife and life partner posted on Friday that “The world lost a great human being this morning. We must remember all of the things Randy did so that we can repeat them. We are all damn lucky to have known him.”

Randy was a life-long farmer with a special knack for fixing and restoring farm equipment, especially red International Harvestermachines.  He had an unquenchable zest for life and enjoyed his reputation as a champion tractor puller in southwest Wisconsin. 

But he also defied the stereotypes you many have of farmers.  Randy was no red MAGA hat wearing cultist.  He was in the long tradition of farm radicals stretching back though the Grange movement, the Progressives, populists, and the Depression era Farm unions.  As one close friend noted on Randy’s Facebook timeline, “He lived the lives of 10 men. He was caring, passionate, and free spirited. He marched for causes most men won’t stand for, from Cuba to Washington D.C.  An advocate for Farmers and Farm Families.”  Those commitments were deep and also included standing for a woman’s right to chooseand Black Lives Matter even in his rural, virtually all white county.  He visited Cuba with agricultural delegations and was a stout supporter of the people and the revolution.

Randy described himself on his Facebook page as “farmer who traveled to Cuba 3 times and now know workers and farmers must have our own government.”

All of which was why the equally remarkable Zena McFadden became enamored of him.  She was the daughter of one of the other “great migrations”—the movement of Southern Appalachian White to Detroit during the Depression and World War II to work in the auto industry and other Northern factories.  But she also had a strong connection to her Tennessee roots, its folktalesand music and the emotionally cathartic Pentecostal faith.  She may have abandoned that faith, but never the feeling of comfort, community, and hope that it fostered.

Zena went on to be a gifted teacher and a spellbinding story teller.  She often shared her stories about her father and family at story telling festivalsand at the Tree of Life UU Congregationin McHenry, Illinois.  She is also a committed activist and member of the Socialist Workers Party who spends time selling The Militant at rallies, marches, picket lines, and demonstrations.  In the course of their activism Randy and Zena connected and fell in love.

Randy had already been married and had an adult son he was close to.  After seeing each other for some time and city girl Zena spending time on Randy’s Richland Center farm during the summers they married.  Zena kept what they called the “Illinois house” in Sycamore while she continued to teach public school science.  When they were in Illinois I saw them both at church and got to know Randy.  We often had long conversations during Social Hour or at social functions.  He was as good a story teller as Zena even if he saved that talent for more intimate chats.  We often spoke of our childhoods and of his growing up on the farm.  He told some hairy farming tales, including how he lost three fingers on one hand in a gruesome farm machinery accident and nearly being crushed when a tractor rolled over in soft ground.

On Monday, October 12 Zena shared the news that Randy had been admitted to a local community hospital in Wisconsin with pneumoniacaused by Covid 19.  She kept us all posted with daily bulletins, but despite some ups and downs, his condition continued to deteriorate beyond the capacity of the local hospital.  He was air-lifted to the University of Wisconsin hospital in Madison where he was given the most up-to-date care.  Despite the care he died early Friday morning.

I will best remember Randy for one of his best stories.  A few years ago at a national farm conference, he met some Black farmers from Arkansaswho were struggling to stay on their land and were too poor to afford modern equipment.  They were still plowing by hand behind mules, back breaking work.  Rand went back to Wisconsin and managed to collect older tractors, now considered obsolete.  He lovingly repaired and restored them, loaded them on a trailer and with Zena at his side drove them to Arkansas to give them for free to those Black farmers.

Rest in Peace and Power, Randy!

Note—Memorial services for Randy are pending. 

On October 23, 1915 more than 25,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City in one of the largest parades for Women’s Suffrageyet held.  That would be impressive enough, but the demonstration was only part of an unprecedented year-long campaign to convince Empire Statevoters to approve a state constitutional amendment giving women the vote.  Nothing like it had ever been seen in complexity and breadth of organization.

New York had long been a leading hot bed of suffrage agitation.  The Brooklyn Woman Suffrage Association was formed in 1869 and the New York City chapter a year later.  By 1903 there were at least 15 organizations in the metropolitan area promoting votes for women.  That year the indefatigable Carrie Chapman Catt brought the various organizations together under the umbrella of Interurban Woman Suffrage Council (IWSC).  Within two years it had more than twenty affiliates and 150 individual associate members who included both established leaders and wealthy women who could bankroll significant campaigns.  They established a headquarters in the Martha Washington Hotel and employed Fannie Chafin to manage day to day operations.

Catt, however, was not satisfied with just the stepped up lobbying, public rallies, and demonstrations.  She realized that support for suffrage was largely still confined to well educated, middle class Protestant women.  In order to secure passage, it would be necessary to secure votes—votes of men of all classes including the teeming ethnicand religious minorities of New York City.  That required a political operation modeled on the existing apparatus of the Democratic and Republican parties.

The IWSC called a founding convention of the new Woman Suffrage Party of Greater New York at Carnegie Hall on October 29, 1909.  804 delegates and 200 alternates attended the convention.  The Party set a goal of having a leader for each of the 63 Assembly Districts of the city and a captain for each of the 2,127 election districts (precincts), with a chair and committee in each borough, under the direction a city chair and board of directors—just the way Tammany Hall did it.

It was an ambitious project and obviously not all positions were filled immediately.  But the women were committed to the long haul and built membership and capacity steadily.  The party sent its forces to local political conventions; held mass meetings; issued thousands of leaflets in many languages; conducted street meetings, parades, plays, lectures, suffrage schools; gave entertainments and teas; sent appeals to churches and all kinds of organizations and to individual leaders; brought pressure onlegislators through their constituentsand obtained wide publicity in newspapers and magazines.

The ground work was laid when the Assemblyvoted to submit a suffrage amendment to the voters in the November 1915 election.  Catt became chair of the statewide campaign, which divided the state into two upstate districts and metropolitan New York.  Mary Garrett Hay, chair of the City party, and her associates sprang into action.  They raised $50,000—an enormous sum in 1915—for the city campaign alone.  A careful campaign with designated tasks from January to Election Day was planned.  The campaign committee was established—includingliaisons to the city’s ethnic communities.  In January alone there were 60 district conventions, 170 canvassing suppers, four mass meetings, 27 canvassing conferences and a convention in Carnegie Hall. 

The plan was to personally canvas all voters 661,164 registered voters in their homes as well contacting them in factories, offices, shops, and all manner of public gatherings.  Women spent thousands upon thousands of hours climbing narrow tenement staircases, and knocking on doors in dark grimy hallways as well as visiting fashionable apartments and suburbs.  As the campaign rolled on, registered membership in the Party swelled to 60,535.

The Party made special efforts to reach out to men by meeting them where they worked.  The designated a number special suffrage days dedicated to various professions.  They visited firemen, barbers, street cleaners among others bringing each special and appropriate gifts and literature.  Workers in the subway excavations were visited with Irish banners and shamrock fliers; Turkish, Armenian, French, Germanand Italian restaurants were canvassed as were the laborers on the docks, on vessels, and in public markets. They did not neglect the denizens of the offices either—they visited brokers, bankers, and lawyers smothering them all with flattery instead of yelling in their faces.

Nor did they neglect public spectacle.  In addition to the great Fifth Avenue March there was a Night of the Interurban Council Fires, when on high bluffs in the different boroughs huge bonfires were lit, fireworks and balloons sent up, with music, speeches, and displays ofilluminated transparencies. There were 28 neighborhood parades and numerous torch light rallies.  The party sponsored street festivals and dances on the Lower East Side for the Irish, Syrians, Poles, and Italians.  There were meetings conducted in Yiddish and dozens of other languages.  Big events like a night with opera stars at Carnegie Hall attracted wide-spread press attention.

According to an article by Oreola Williams Haskell, head of the campaign’s press bureau by Election Day the campaign had accomplished the following:

Voters canvassed (60 per cent of those enrolled): 396,698
Women canvassed: 60,535
Voters circularized: 826,796
Party membership increased from 151,688 to 212,223
Watchers and pickets furnished for the polls: 3,151
Numbers of leaflets printed and distributed: 2,883,264
Money expended from the City treasury: $25,579
Number of outdoor meetings: 5,225
Number of indoor meetings (district): 660
Number of mass meetings: 93
Political meetings addressed by Congressmen, Assemblymen and Constitutional Convention delegates:  25
Total number of meetings: 6,003
Night speaking in theaters: 60
Theater Week (Miner’s and Keith’s): 2
Speeches and suffrage slides in movie theaters: 150
Concerts (indoor, 10 outdoor, 3): 13
Suffrage booths in bazaars: 6
Number of Headquarters (Borough 4, Districts, 20): 24
Campaign vans (drawn by horses 6, decorated autos 6, district autos 4), vehicles in constant use: 16
Papers served regularly with news (English and foreign): 80
Suffrage editions of papers prepared: 2
Special articles on suffrage: 150
Sermons preached by request just before election: 64

Despite all of these impressive efforts, the campaign failed.  In the City the vote was 320,853 opposed and 238,098 in support.  The defeat was more lopsided Up State.  But the women were far from discouraged.  Two days after the election the City Party united with the National Association for Women’s Suffrage in a mass meeting at Cooper Union, and $100,000 was pledged for a new campaign fund. 

Two years later they ginned up the campaign all over again.  That time they won.  New York State became one of the first Eastern states to adopt women’s suffrage—all due to good old fashion street level politics.

There must be a lesson in that somewhere.

Break out the Champaign and some tough roots, grass, and bark for the guest of honor!  It’s Wombat Day Down Under. It’s an ancient tradition stretching all the way back to 2005.  And so what if those asses in Canberra haven’t gotten around to making it a legal holiday with the Post Officeclosed, military parades, and bands playing Waltzing Mathilda, it’s good enough to raise a can of Foster’s and throw another shrimp on the barbie.

The occasion celebrates those cuddly short-legged, muscular marsupials native to Australia with pudgy snouts and short tails that resemble small, over-fed bears.  They are adaptable to Australia’s various often in hospitable environments from arid semi-desert to forestsand mountain sides.  Not that anyone actually sees them much in the wild.  That’s because they are the world’s largest burrowing mammals—adults average about 40 inches long and can weigh between 35 and 70 pounds—and spend much of their lives in the their extensive burrow systems.  Being nocturnal they generally only come out to dine at night except for the rare darkly overcast, rainy day.

The stout little beasts have powerful forelimbs with impressive claws for digging and large rodent-like incisors to gnaw through their tough diet choices.  Their natural predators were few—the dingo, now extinct Tasmanian devil, and, of course humans.  Over the last century feral dogs have heavily damaged the population.

Wombats are naturally both slow moving and shy, but can be aggressive when startled or threatened.  They have been known to charge humans who get near them and are large and heavy enough to knock down a grown man.  Their long, sharp claws can slash human flesh and bites can penetrate stout boots and thick socks.  On the other hand, humans, both Aborigines and early White settlers hunted them for food.  The settlers, with their fire arms and hunting dogs, quickly reduced the Wombat population and rangeover much of the southeastern part of the Continent.

Despite holding a day in their honor, Australians have a mighty ambivalent attitude toward the wombat.  The Aborigines did not seem to esteem them, despite relying on them as a protein source.  They did not imbue them with the spiritual powers and significance of other animals—kangaroos, snakes, crocodiles, sharks, etc.—in their Dreamtime mythologies and seldom depicted them in their rock art.  The origin story about them is hardly flattering—originating from a person named Warreen whose head had been flattened by a stone and tail amputated as punishmentfor selfishness.

When white settlers—most of them, you will recall, transported prisoners and their military guards—arrived, their opinion of the creatures was not much better.  At first because of the similarity of size and burrow habitations they were mistaken for a kind of badger, the large European weasel and omnivore totally unrelated the local marsupial.  Several Australian place names containing the name badger—Badger Creek, Victoria and Badger Corner, Tasmania  for instance—are really named for wombats. 

The English adopted the name from a corruption of the now extinct DarugAboriginal language.  In 1798 John Price was exploring in what is now New South Wales with James Wilson who had lived with the Aborigines when he recorded in his diary:

We saw several sorts of dungof different animals, one of which Wilson called a Whom-batt, which is an animal about 20 inches high, with short legs and a thick body with a large head, round ears, and very small eyes; is very fat, and has much the appearance of a badger.

That dung or scat is among the most tell-tale signs of the presence of wombats.   Because of their fibrous diet and highly efficient digestive process, wombats leave distinctive, compact cubical shaped pellets. 

It took much of the 19th Century to standardize the spelling of the animal.  Meanwhile they were being hunted for meat, sport, and because their burrowing was seen as a nuisance to farming and particularly sheep grazing.  The Europeans characterized the animals in their own folk stories as fat, lazy, and greedy.

By the early 20th Century all three species—the common wombat, Northern Hairy-nosed Wombat, and Southern Hairy-nosed Wombat—were all under pressure.  Wombats were classified as vermin in 1906, and a bounty was placed on them in 1925.  The results were entirely predictable.

The Northern Hairy-nosed Wombat is extremely endangered.  Only 138 were known to survive as of 2007 and their range confined to the Epping Forest National Park in Queensland where they are protected behind a predator proof fence.  Tenuous efforts have been made to re-establish another colony at the Richard Underwood Nature Refuge at Yarran Downs.  The species has become a symbol of Australian efforts to preserve endangered species.

But their Southern cousins and the now far-from Common Wombat are also under extreme pressure.  All species have been declared protected in all states but Victoria where the Department of Environment and Primary Industries still classifies them as a pest and allows both hunting and in some cases, poisoning.

Attempts by conservationists to manage a recoveryof the population are hindered by the low fertility and reproductive rates of wombats.  Adult females produce only one offspring each breeding season after a gestation of 20-21 days.  They carry the joey in their well-developed pouches for seven months.  Alone among marsupials, the wombat pouch opens toward the animal’s rear.  This prevents the joey from being smothered by dirt as the mother expands her burrow during which her powerful front legs and claws toss dirt behind her.  The babies emerge as furry miniature adults.  They are weanedat 15 months and on their own and sexually active at a year and a half.

The threatened and endangered status of wombats has evoked some degree of public sympathy and affection for the previously scorned critter.  They are sometimes used as a symbol for conservation efforts and have even appeared on Australian postage in recent years, something that their more glamorous cousins—Kangaroos, Koalas, Tasmanian Devils, and Platypuses achieved decades earlier.

Wombat prestige has also been boosted as they funny looking animals have become staples of Australian kiddy picture books, children’s literature, and children’s television.  One popular animated series features a wombat family.

Still the creatures lag behind those other iconic Aussie animals in public acceptance.  No Australian professional or college sports team has adopted the wombat as their mascot.

Perhaps that is why fans of the animal launched Wombat Day in 2005.  It seeks to honor the animal, but has more than a touch of tongue-in-cheek humor about it.  The only customs I could find associated with the celebration are viewing parties at zoos and animal preserves and bakingand consuming homemade chocolate cakes or brownies made in the shape of a wombat.  Which leads me to suspect that the chocolate industry may be behind much of the annual promotion of the holiday.  Oh, they also consume a confection called Wine Gums.  Beats the hell out of me what they are.

October 22 was supposedly chosen because it is smack dab in the middleof the Southern Hemisphere spring planting season and there are said to be certain vague traditions linking wombats with fertility.  These claims are open to question.

Anyway, there you have it.  A new reason to celebrate.  And coming in the midst of the semi-lockdown of the Coronavirus pandemic leaves us all a bonkers this writer needs a cause to celebrate something.  Pass the Wombat Cake. 

Note—From eight years ago on this date.

Yesterday morning my old Shimerfriend Teri Loeb casually wrote in a Facebook status entry, “On my way home from Idaho. Didn’t realize that it was a real place. LOL” More than a little groggy from an overnight shift, I posted a reply.

Later, I looked at it and realized it was a poem in hiding.  Here it is, all dressed up in line breaks and poetic form without an altered word.

Accidental Idaho

Some of it is imaginary.

Break the crest of the Lolo trail

on one of the few summer days

when it is clear of snow

where Lewis and Clark labored heavily

over the Divide and look out over

the blue-green world by a wandering creek

and off in the distance you swear

you can see the smoke of a Nez Percé fire.

And in rustling wind you think you may dimly hear

the hoof beats of their Appaloosas

—Patrick Murfin

Note—This is related to the last post about the Trial of the Chicago 7 and the 1968 Democratic Convention protests.  This was kind of a preview featuring many of the same people.

There were other big marches in Washington in opposition to the Vietnam War.  Starting in 1965 they had practically become semi-annual events.  There would be more—and larger—ones later.  But the March to Confront the War Makers on October 21, 1967 was different.  It signaled a new phase in the anti-war movement that incorporated the rising youth counter   culture on a large scale for the first time and willingness for more aggressive confrontation of authority.  It also introduced onto a national stage some figures who would become household names within a year.

The march was organized, as were previous ones, by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam—universally referred to simply as the Mobe—a shaky coalition of more than 150 organizations including traditional pacifists, Ban the Bomb groups, liberals, the Old Left, the New Left, Viet Cong sympathizers, a sliver of the Civil Rights Movement, student groupslike the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and anti-war veteran groups.  It was united only in opposition to the war.

The organization was so shaky that after the tumultuous events of this demonstration it fell apart.  It was re-assembled, minus its less militant componentsas the New Mobe the following year in time to organize protests at the Democratic National Convention.

The Mobe was led by veteran radical pacifist Dave Dellinger, the fifty-something editor of Liberation magazine.  In order to reach out to more young people—earlier marches, in retrospect seem like the sedate affairs of the middle class—Dellinger recruited California activist Jerry Rubin to be project coordinator for the march.  It was Rubin’s idea to add a March on the Pentagon after the main rally on the National Mall broke up.

The rally and March were just part of a series of actions in and around Washington.  A day earlier a march of hundreds on the Justice Department organized by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and other anti-draft groups presented more than 1,000 returnedDraft Cards to a reluctant Assistant Attorney General.  Other small demonstrations and picketing were organized by various component groups in the Mobe around Washington.

Among those who came to Washington, many in rented school buses, was a car load organized by Chicago Seed editor Abe Peck

A highlight of the Rally on the Mall was to be the arrival of the Peace Torch, lit in Hiroshima on August 6.  It was carried across country from San Franciscoin a highly publicized relayreminiscent of the journeys of the Olympic Torch.

Although several Blacks spoke from the podium of the Mall Rally—mostly long time members of Old Left parties—most African Americans boycotted the main demonstration where President Lyndon B. Johnson was sure to come under attack.  Many were grateful for his steadfast support of major Civil Rights legislation.  A separate rally was held at Howard University where opposition to the war was largely separated from opposition to the President.  The most important Black leader to come out strongly against the war, Rev. Martin Luther King, was absent from both events.  

The huge rally was typical of others of its type—a parade of speakers representing the component organizations interspersed with brief entertainment.  Dellinger hinted at a shift in anti-war strategy by saying that it was time to “to go from protest to resistance.”  Norman Mailer, then the most celebrated novelist in America, famously spoke.  His role in the Rally and later events was celebrated in his book Armies of the Night, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. 

The main speaker was Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose baby care book was the Bible by which most of the young members of the crowd had been raised.  Spock had supported Johnson in 1964 and felt betrayed by his escalation of the war.  The kindly Spock was one of the last nods at getting the parents of Baby Boomers on board the anti-war movement.  But the days when he and organizations like Another Mother for Peace could be the face of the movement were ending.

When the main Rally broke up, a large portion of the crowd began the two and a half mile march to the Pentagon.  By some estimates as many at 50,000 began the long walk, which took them across the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac and up a long service road to the Defense Department headquarters.  Many did not finish the trip.  The line strung out so that it took well over an hour for everyone to get into the site.

When marchers got there they were confrontedwith a building encircled by 2,500 Federal troops and 200 U.S. Marshals.  A rope line was set up in advance of the security forces and authorities announced that anyone crossing the line would be arrested.

Marchers also encountered a smaller groupalready at the Pentagon.  Organized by Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, festoonedin an American flag shirt and Uncle Sam hat, the newly formed Youth International Party—the Yippies, an organization that hardly existed except in flyers circulated on college campuses and in big city youth culture enclaves, were there to supposedly levitate the Pentagon.

Many of those first on the scene peacefully approached the defense line.  Images of young people putting flowers in the barrels of Army M-15s became iconic.  But soon more militant demonstrators were challenging the line.  Arrests began.  Small groups managed to get partially up the steps of the building.  Others found an unguarded access ramp and charged in.  They were met with rifle butts and particularly by the aggressive batons of Federal Marshals who busted several heads. Tear gas was used on the crowd and there was some chaos and panic.

But the majority of the demonstrators continued to stand by.  Many sang America the Beautiful and other patriotic and anti-war songs as the battle raged.  By 7 pm things had settled down.  Authorizes announced that the permit for the demonstration had expired.  Most of the remaining demonstrators drifted away, but about 7,000 chose to stay.  No move was made to dislodge them, but as overnight temperatures dropped, many more left.

At dawn a few hundred left to march to the White House to “wake up LBJ.”  There were more arrests there, including those charged with picking flowers in Lafayette Park.  A few hundred others stayed behind to keep a vigil at the Pentagon.  At midnight the remaining 200 were rousted or arrested.

In all 681, including Hoffman and Mailer, were arrested over the two days.  Many demonstrators were bloodied or overcome by tear gas.  Over 100 demonstrators were documented to have been treated for injuries.  Many more were undoubtedly hurt.  In addition some soldiers, marshals, and police sustained minor injuries, mostly from objects thrown at them during the confrontation at the Pentagon or scuffles during arrests.

The events in Washington that weekend set the stage for even more tumultuous and confrontational protests around the country in the next few years.

In Chicago the Seed offices became the unofficial headquarters for the Yippie’s next big project, the counter cultural Festival of Life during the 1968 Democratic Convention.  But Abe Peck had a warning for flower-power hippies who expected bands and dope shrouded festivities in the park—“If you come, be sure to wear some armor in your hair.”

Last night we watched Aaron Sorkin’swidely anticipated The Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflicks.  Sorkin, of course, is the writer/directorwho specializes in taught, smart, and sometimes funny political drama like the acclaimed TV series The West Wing and The Newsroom as well as the movie script based on his own play A Few Good Men and other film projects including An American President, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Social Network, Steve Jobs, and Molly’s Game.  No American writer was a better choice to chronicle a courtroom drama like no other set against the tumultuous crescendoof 1960’s anti-war movement, the youth counter culture, Black militancy, and Nixonian paranoid repressive backlash.

The film captured the moment brilliantly with crackling dialogue, striking character portraits, and brilliant acting.  Many of the courtroom scenes drew heavily from the actual trial transcripts.  But Sorkin would be the first to acknowledge for the movie certain dramatic liberties were taken, time lines compressed or jumbled, and fly-on-the-wall scenes of private interactions between the defendants and their lawyers invented.  I understand that, although it has proved troubling for some of those involved.

The most minor quibbles are over the appearance of the characters.  Sasha Baron Cohen may have been born to play Abbie Hoffman but he is so tall that he looms over everyone else.  On the other hand six foot tall defense lawyer William Kunstler was portrayed by the diminutive Mark Rylance.  John Carroll Lynch’s Dave Dellinger was balder and heavier than the oldest of the defendants. But those trivialities were quickly forgotten given the fine performances.  Particular note should be taken of Eddie Redmayne as Abbie Hoffman’s foil, the serious and conflicted Tom Hayden and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as the tautly wound Black Panther Chairman Bobby Seale.

I the courtroom scenes the historical nits to pick are more substantial.  Bobby Seale was gagged and bound to his chair on October 29 by order of Judge Julius Hoffman and appeared daily in court that way for several days before his case was severed from the others.   Illinois Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton was murdered by the police on December 4 after Seale was gone.  Life-long pacifist Dave Dellinger did not punch a bailiff.  And however satisfying as a film climax, Tom Hayden did not try to read the names of more than 50,000 Vietnam War dead in his pre-sentencing statement.

Other issues arose from the flash backs to actual events during the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests.  Glaringly the events in Lincoln Park on the first nights were completely omitted despite the fact that police charges there were probably the most violent of the whole convention week perhaps because almost no film footage and damned few new photos exist.  The request for permits to sleep in the park was for Lincoln Park, not Grant Park as depicted.  The critical events of Wednesday were telescoped and skewed.  I know.  I was there.

The Band Shell rally was held in the early afternoon, not at night as shown in the film.  Hayden did not lead demonstrators almost immediately to the confrontation by the Conrad Hilton on Michigan Avenue.  Hayden, Rennie Davis, and Abbie Hoffman were not pushed through the window of the Haymarket bar.  I know because I witnessed people going through the plate glass windows from directly across the street on Balbo.  And I knew that Hayden was not there because I had unexpectedly shared a taxi with him shortly before.

The following excerpts from my memoir series Chicago Summer of ’68 is how I remember that afternoon and evening.

Everyone knew that Wednesday of Convention Week was going to be the Big Day.  That’s when the Democrats down at the International Amphitheater were supposed to select their Presidential candidate.  The press and cameras of the nation were on hand for the event.

For the first time I had a running buddy when I left the church Movement Center that morning.  My friend Amy Kesselman came with.  Amy stood a good 5 foot nothing.  She had short black hair, deep brown eyes, and a little mole on her upper lip.  Cute as a bug’s ear.  Hey, I was 19 and noticed such things.  But I would never dream of putting a move on her. She was so intensely serious, in her 20’s and a dedicated SDSer of the community organizing stripe.  Out of my league, for sure…

We took the train down town.  It was a very pleasant day, the warmest of the week, but still cool enough for me to wear my denim jacket.  Tuesday the city was under a high haze or light clouds, but that day there was a glorious clear blue sky.  Most of the seating in front of the Band Shell in Grant Park was taken when we got there.  Speechifying had already begun.  The park swarmed with cops in their baby blue helmets, but they seemed to be keeping their distance.

We found a spot just to the right of the seats but within ten feet or so of the stage.  We had a very good vantage point for the program.  Phil Ochs was there to sing again, but this program was more about the speeches.  Boy was there a parade of them.  All of the by now usual suspects—Dellinger, Gregory, Ginsberg, Rubin, and Hayden made appearances…

While we were listening to speeches in the Park, so were delegates in the Convention Hall who were debating a “Peace Plank” to the Platform proposed by Eugene McCarthy’s forces.  Word got to the rally that it had been soundly defeated.  As the crowd booed and jeered someone started to haul down the flag from a pole on the left of the stage, just across the crowd from us.  I couldn’t get a good view, but evidently a gaggle of cops surged forward to arrest him starting a small melee around the flag.  After he was dragged off others succeed in bringing the flag down and hoisting a shirt smeared with real or fake blood.  It later turned out one of the hoisters was an undercover cop.

Realizing that this would bring a full scale assault the word went out for Mobe marshals to deploy around the crowd.  I never heard the call, which undoubtedly saved my ass.  Most of those in the seats still watching the stage were unaware as the cops closed in from three sides, swinging their clubs.  The line of marshals was pinned against the seats, many beaten senseless, including Rennie Davis.

The crowd stampeded many falling and stumbling amid the seats.  The cops beat them unmercifully where they fell.  Amy and I had room to maneuver and stayed out of harm’s way.  We could see a few objects being thrown back into the police lines, but the battle was one sided.

If you ever say the movie Medium Cool, you may remember a blurred shot of the red-headed leading lady streaking across the screen in terror.  Haskell Wexler was filming with his cast on the scene and they were caught up in the attack.

After a few heart pounding minutes, the police retreated dragging their prisoners with them.  People began to attend the wounded.  I dabbed blood from a few broken heads from the collection of my father’s old handkerchiefs that I carried in the old ammo pouch on my utility belt.

From the stage Dellinger and Hayden tried to regain control of the crowd.  Except that they couldn’t agree on what we should do.  Dellinger wanted to go ahead with the announced big march from the rally to the Amphitheater.  Hayden, recalling the tactics of Lincoln Park wanted people to break up into small groups to try and infiltrate the city then join up on Michigan Ave. for a march.

Like most of the crowd, I decided to stay with the March.  I figured there was safety in numbers.  The far more adventuresome Amy, I believe, opted to go with the small groups.  Anyway, we got separated.

We lined up on a sidewalk alongside the Band Shell, but headed north, probably to get to the nearest bridge over the Illinois Central tracks.  But we were unable to move.  The police blocked the march for lack of a permit.  Dellinger and others tried to negotiate a deal to let us pass.  We stood in that long line for at least an hour.

After while a small knot of cops, a couple of brass in uniform and hulking Red Squad cops in mufti came down the line.  They had a young guy with them—either a stool pigeon or an undercover agent.  He was picking out people in the line and identifying them as one of the Red Squad goons scribbled furiously.  When they got to me one of says, “Oh we know who this guy is.” I didn’t recognize the guy from either of my two earlier personal encounters with Chicago’s finest. Now I admit with my cowboy hat I stood out, but I was astonished that any one as insignificant as me would be even be noticed.  Later I figured that because of the SDS folks, our Movement Center was probably under much more intense surveillance than other places.

After it became apparent that the March was going nowhere, the crowd began to break up to try and find a way out of the park.  This was not easy as most paths were quickly blocked.  A large group of us headed into the park in search of a route.  We were hemmed in at a distance on either side by cops. 

We came on a set of tennis courts each surrounded by 10 foot high chain link fences.  But there were narrow open doorways and on the far side an opening to what looked like an open road to the north.  Those in the lead plunged into the courts. I dutifully followed, but was sure that once a two or three hundred of us were inside the cops would shut the gates and we would be trapped.  I will never know why we weren’t, but it was an immense relief to get out of those cages.

We were finally headed north on Columbus Drive.  We tried to get across the tracks at Congress.  But the first Illinois National Guard troops we had yet seen were blocking the way.  The same was true at Jackson.  A suburban mom type in a respectable sedan drove passed us up to the road block.  Where she came from or how she got there I don’t know, but she didn’t seem to be a demonstrator.  She had picked up an injured kid who was in the back seat.  She argued with a Guardsman that she just wanted to get the kid to a hospital.  The trooper was having none of it.  She tried to inch forward, which is when another Guardsman punctured her front tire with a bayonet.

We kept moving north through the park until we found a bridge unattended at Jackson.  Somehow I was near the head of the column, which probably happened when we reversed directions.  When we finally found an open bridge over the rail tracks at Jackson we could see something moving south on Michigan Avenue.  To our astonishment the Poor People’s Campaign Mule Train was coming down Michigan Avenue heading south.

If things had worked out differently in Memphis that April, Dr. King himself might have been in the lead wagon.  The Poor People’s Campaign was his dream to unite the poor of all races into a new movement for economic justice.  But he was dead and Ralph Abernathy was left to carry on.  He was on the seat of the lead wagon dressed in overalls.  The mule train was meant to recall the promise of 20 acres and a mule free and clear to Freedmen after the Civil War.  Their presence in Chicago was really just to publicize a planned encampment in Washington to pressure Congress for a whole new economic deal for the poor.

Most importantly, the Poor People’s Campaign had secured what almost no one else had—a permit to drive their wagons right up to the doorstep of the International Amphitheater.

We surged over the bridge and joined the procession.  Others were already with them.  More joined as we inched south filtering in from the Park or coming from elsewhere in the city. 

To tell the truth Abernathy and his people did not look exactly thrilled to find their wagons suddenly engulfed by disheveled youth, many of us still reeking of tear gas or nursing wounds.  They had good reason to believe that their permit would not be honored if we were with them.  And these folks who had themselves endured so much police violence in the South, worried that we would draw the same response down upon them again.

It is only a few blocks south from Jackson to Balbo.  But at the methodical, plodding pace of the mule drawn wagons and as we clogged the street with swelling numbers it seemed like an hour, or so to reach it as the Chicago Police scrambled to get a large force in front of us and redeploy the forces from Grant Park and other sites in the city.

When we finally reached Balbo, the cops had enough massed force to block the march further south.  The marchers pushed up tightly, filling Michigan Avenue and spilling into the edge of Grant Park.  It looked, as best as I could tell in the press and confusion, that the crowd stretched back a block or more, but there were probably no more than a couple of thousand folks.  It was a standoff.

As the crowd went into a chant after chant, Abernathy and his people negotiated with the police.  Eventually, they were allowed to pass, but the cordon of cops quickly closed and blocked the rest of us.

I was getting uncomfortable in the crowd. I noticed that the sidewalk was clear right around the corner on Balbo across from the Conrad Hilton.  I stepped over there to get my bearings.

The light was fading to dusk when I heard my friend Amy Kesselman’s voice.  She had found me again after we had been separated earlier at the Band Shell.  At six foot two and wearing the only cowboy hat around, it was a lot easier for her to find me.  I would never have picked all five foot nothing of her out the crowd.

We tried to decide what to do.  Amy wanted to try and find other staffers from the Movement Center.  She thought that they were well back on Michigan.  Since there was no way to push through the crowd on Michigan, we decided to head north on Wabash then cut back to the Avenue.

There were some cops forming on Wabash, so we went on to State.  It was amazing.  Life seemed to be going on as normal.  The sidewalks bustled with ordinary folk going about their evening as if nothing at all extraordinary was occurring two blocks over.  We cut back to Michigan and sure enough found ourselves to the rear of the crowd.  But a glance made it clear that it would be unlikely that we would connect with the others.  Now Amy wanted to go back where we started because she was sure things were going to get interesting.

She spotted a cab coming down Michigan behind the crowd.  She grabbed my hand and said “come on!”  We hopped in the cab.  Amy asked to go to State and Balbo.  The driver looked disgusted, whether at the short fare or our appearance.  But just as he was getting ready to pull away from the curb, the door of the cab flew open and two guys tumbled in, both looking the worse for wear.

One of them was Tom Hayden.  He was babbling a non-stop monologue that didn’t seem to make much sense.  “He thinks he’s Thomas Jefferson,” the other guy explained.  I’m not sure if he had gotten bopped in the head at the Band Shell like Rennie Davis or if maybe Abbie Hoffman had shared some dope with him.  Anyway, the second guy said, “We gotta get him to safety.”  He mentioned the name of a hotel.

After delivering Hayden and his pal to safety, we took the cab back to Balbo.  Amy must have paid, because by this time in the week I was down to pocket change.

It was full dark by the time we got back to where we started, on the Balbo sidewalk directly across from the entrance to the Hilton’s Haymarket restaurant.  Bright TV lights shined down from the upper floors of the Hilton, the official convention headquarters hotel were the media and many delegates were encamped.  We could barely make out a line of blue helmets across Michigan.  Protestors surged against them from time to time.

Suddenly, a large phalanx of cops appeared from Wabash and massed on Balbo.  They had their batons out and looked like they meant business.  They marched in military formation right down the street sweeping passed us on the sidewalk and plowed into the mass of demonstrators, clubs flaying.  The cops along Michigan joined the fray.  I am told that another unit hit the crowd on Michigan from the rear.

If you were alive and sentiment in the ‘60’s you probably remember the scene, which was broadcast live on network television shooting the action from Hilton windows.  The police violence that had largely been hidden from public view all week was there for the nation to see in all of its savagery.

It was like we were invisible on our side of the street, still in the shadows not illuminated by those lights.  Folks right across from us in front of the Haymarket were not so lucky.  Several of them looked to delegates, staffers, and other associated with the convention, not protestors.  But a handful of cops waded into them with gusto.  They pushed some through the plate glass windows of the restaurant.

Batons were still flaying as demonstrators began waving and pointing at the TV lights chanting over and over “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”

As the beatings continued those in the relative safety of Grant Park began pointing at the bright lights of the TV cameras aimed from the upper floors of the Conrad Hilton and took up the chant, "The Whole World is Watching, The Whole World is Watching!"

Some of the wounded began to straggle up our side of the street hugging the building for safety.  We guided a couple of them back up the street toward Wabash where I set up a kind of rough aid station using the first aid kit on my utility belt and more of my dad’s handkerchiefs.  Amy ferried more to me as I dabbed blood and washed tear gas from eyes until my canteen was dry.  I was soon out of what meager supplies I had.

Amy and I and our patients were still in danger.  Squads of cops were now breaking off chasing demonstrators.  We told our charges to scatter as they were able.  We helped some get to State Street.  We clamored down the stairs to the subway and headed north.

We evidently were just ahead of adrenalin pumped squads of cops who swept up Wabash and State beating any one they could find, including folks emerging from theaters.

We got off at Diversey and stumbled into the church Movement Center exhausted. Amazingly it was not yet 11 o’clock.  We huddled around the radio trying to find out what was happening.

Note:  The Chicago Bears officially celebrated their centennial last season base on their origins as a semi-pro team in Decatur.  Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Decatur Staley's first game in a new professional league. The launch of a pro league had been delayed by the world-wide Spanish Flue pandemic of 1918-19.  This year the league struggles to play during the Coronavirus pandemic which has shortened the season, kept fans from stadiums, and has hit some teams hard threatening the completion of the season.

Somewhat astonishingly the team has a 4 and 1 record going into this Sunday’s game against the Carolina Panthers despite an under-productive offense.  In their last game they eked out a narrow win over Tampa Bay and their new Quarter Back Tom Brady, late of the New England Patriots.  So today we look back at that 1920 game and the evolution of Da Bears.

On October 17, 1920 there was a football game at Rock Island, Illinois.  The Decatur Staleys, under the leadership of former professional baseball player George Halas, beat the home town Rock Island Independents by a score of 7-0.  The only thing that made the game memorable was that it was the first game played by teams of the new American Professional Football Association; a fledgling professional league renamed two years later as the National Football League (NFL.)

The Staleys, who started out as a semi-pro team in 1919 sponsored by the food starch producer A. E. Staley Company, had a pretty good season finishing with 10 wins, 1 loss, and 2 ties.  They finished second to the Akron Pros.

The new league was the brainchild of legendary athlete Jim Thorpe, player-coach of the Canton Bulldogs.  He had been promoting the idea among other independent pro and semi-pro teams since 1917, but World War I and then the Spanish Influenza pandemic prevented anything from happening.  Thorpe and Leo Lyons, owner of the barnstormingRochester Jeffersons got representatives from a number of teams to gather for a meeting in August 1920 in a Hupmobile Dealership in Canton, Ohio to launch the league.    Thorpe was elected President of the league in addition to his player/coach duties with Bulldogs. 

The teams competing that first year included Canton Bulldogs, Decatur Staleys, Chicago Cardinals, Akron Pros, Cleveland Indians, Dayton Triangles, Hammond Pros, Muncie Flyers, Rock Island Independents, Rochester Jeffersons, Buffalo All-Americans, Chicago Tigers, Columbus Panhandles, and Detroit Heralds.  Of these 16 teams only 11 managed to finish the season.

In 1921 Halas got permission to take his team to Chicago.  The Staley Company gave him $5000 to keep the name for at least the first year.  The team played Cubs Park (now Wrigley Field), finished with a 9-1-1 record, and won the League’s second Championship. 

Freed from his contractual obligation Halas renamed the team the Chicago Bears in 1922 as a nod to his stadium hosts, the Chicago Cubs.  The league was still struggling in 1925 when Hallas signed the biggest star in college football, Red Grange, the Galloping Ghost of the University of Illinois.  In honor of his prize player, Halas changed the team colors to the orangeand blue of the Illini.  The move elevatedthe prestige of the pro league which played second fiddle to hugely popular inter-collegiate football in the sports press.

Today only two of the original franchises remain active, neither of them in their original location.  The Cardinals have moved twice, from Chicago to St. Louis and then to Arizona.  The Staleys became the Bears after only two seasons and moved to Chicago after one.  But the team is the only one still owned by the same family.  

Virginia Halas McCaskey, George’s daughter who was born in 1923, the year the team became the Bears, is the principle owner.  After her son Michael McCaskey retired as team president in 2009 he was replaced by Ted Philips and for the first time day-to-day management of the team is not in family hands.  Michael’s brother George, however, is still the Chairman of the Board.  Members of the Halas/McCaskey family own 80% of the company stock and show no signs of selling.

The team now plays in the renovated Soldier Field which famously resembles the crash site of a UFO thanks to a favorable lease from the Chicago Park District, fancy bond deals involving the City and State, and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure workprovided by the City at no cost to the team at all.

Former coach Mike Ditka used to say that old George Halas “Threw nickels around like manhole covers.”  Halas would undoubtedly be proud of the scams on the public his heirs have pulled off.   

I don’t know how the people of London, England bear up under the sorrow of the anniversaries of two deadly disasters every October 17.  Yet they bravely soldier on.  Their slogan is “Keep Calm and Carry On [Sargent, Nurse, Etc.]”

For the first of these unfortunate occurrences we have to reach back all the way to October 17, 1091.  No that isn’t a typo.  On that date the first tornado ever recorded in the British Isles—and one of damn few since—stuck and destroyed the heart of London.  And it was a dilly, too.  Scientistsbelieve it would have a rating of a T-8 storm—described as severely devastating with rotating winds in the 210-240 mile per hour range.  That is right up there with a major Oklahoma hair raiser.

A small tornado struck London again on September 11, 2007 injuring 7, reviving interest in the earlier visit.

What is most surprising is how small London was at the time.  Not quite a back water, but long passed its glory days as Londinium, the Roman capital of Britannia.  Before the Romans high tailed it out, it had swarmed with an estimated 45-60,000 inhabitants in a city filled with “modern” Roman conveniences and architecture. 

But as Britain commenced its long slide into the Dark Ages after 140 CE (AD for you old timers and Christo-centrics out there.)  The island fell into squabbling petty kingdoms then had to contend with waves of invaders—the Angles, Saxons, and eventually the Danes.  London no longer served as a real capital.  Kings with the upper hand ruled usually from their home strongholds, surrounded by reliable knights and men-at-arms.  By the end of the First Millennium only 5,000-10,000 inhabitants remained and most scholars put the population on the low end of that scale. 

In 1043 the Danish/Norse King Cnut died and a Saxon, Edward the Confessor became King, more or less, with his base in the southeast around London.  Although he seldom lived there, he began to use the city once again as a ceremonial capital and to that end commissioned the construction of Westminster Abby—the biggest public works project since the Romans.  People began to filter back.  Edward died in 1066 and was laid to rest in the unfinished Cathedral and succeeded by the unfortunate Harold, who lost the kingdom to yet another invader, Norman William the Conqueror the same year at the Battle of Hastings.

William marched on London and the town surrendered in December of that year.  He built a castle there and continued work on the Abby, where he had been crowned.  When he wasn’t on the continent or in the field beating down some rebellion or invasion, he ruled from the city.  When William died in 1087, the population was on a modest upswing, with maybe 18,000 inhabitants.

William II, son of the Conqueror sat on the throne the year of the tornado but probably was not in London. 

But except for some Roman ruins, the Abby and William’s castle, most of the city was built of timber, wattle, and thatch.  More than 600 homes and the wooden London Bridge over the Thames were destroyed as were several churches when the tornado struck.   Among the devastated churches was the original building of St Mary-le-Bow, famous in a later incarnation as the home of the bells of which all true Cockney’s are born within earshot.  The power of the tornado was so strong that four of the church’s massive 26 foot long rafters were driven into the ground and buried with only 4 feet exposed.

Remarkably, only two deaths were recorded from the tornado, because the flimsy construction of most homes did not lead to death by crushingwhen they were destroyed.  Likely, however, there were many unrecorded deaths in the confusion of the aftermath.  Commoners crowded into hovels were not all documented, and many church records were lost.  The lowliest may not have even been deemed worthy of note. 

The city, of course, rebounded, with more substantial buildings replacing those destroyed.  Population continued to grow steadily despite numerous “great fires.” Long bouts with the Black Death in 1337 and again in 1665 did actually threaten to depopulate the city again.

But by 1814, London was not only the largest city in Europe and probably in the world, it was the cocky capital of a robust and expanding worldwide Empire.  Yet once again tragedy struck on the fateful date of October 17 only 723 years after the tornado.

In the Parish of St. Giles—in the heart of the district ravaged by the storm—a 135,000 imperial Gallon vat of beer at the Meux and Company Brewery on Tottenham Court Road suddenly rupturedsending out a torrent that knocked over additional vats.  323,000 imperial gallons surged out of the buildings and into the streets in a wall of beer. 

The brewery was located in a poor area—some of the homes may actually have dated back to the reconstructionfollowing the tornado.  Families in rags crowded into rooms and into cellars.  Many of those cellars flooded, drowningseveral victims.   Official records note 6 deaths by drowning and 16 year old Eleanor Cooper, a serving wench at the Tavistock Arms Pub who died when the wall of beer collapsed the walls of the place upon her.  Scores were injured.

Officials prosecuted the brewer, but the accident was ruled an Act of God.  Since taxes had already been paid on the lost beer, they petitioned Parliament for relief and the return of the paid duties.  No known payments were made to any of the victims or their families.

The brewery was finally razed in 1922 and today the Dominion Theatre occupies a part of the site.

Amazingly, there are no public commemorations of either tragedy are scheduled—except at the Holborn Whippet, a pub near the site which began serving a specially brewedporter to be served only on October 17.  As far as I know there will still be a commemoration there despite the Coronaviruswhich London’s current long drawn out calamity. If you can make it there today, you can at least raise a glass to the lost victims of London’s disasters. 

The Apache leader Victorio may not be as well-known as his contemporaries Cochise and Geronimo, largely because when he was conducting his most famous campaigns against the U.S. and Mexican Armies in sparsely populated and inhospitable regions on both sides of the border the attention of the nationwas riveted on the larger wars with the Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes on the northern plains.  But he was a wily and dangerous warrior who ran circles around the troops that pursued him for years.  Until fate caught up with him.

Victorio’s origins are murky, and what we know or think we know is based on sometimes conflicting oral accounts from various Apache bands.  His tribal name was Bidu-ya or Beduiat.  Victorio was a name given him by his hated Mexican enemies.  Most sources say he was born around 1825 in the rugged mountains of what was then the Mexican state of Nuevo Mexico.  Other sources claim he was born as early as 1809.

Even his tribal affiliations, which shifted with kinship relations and various bands merging and diverging over time, are confused.  He was most likely born a member of the Chihennesometimes called the Mimbreñodivision of the central Apaches, which had kinship relations with the Navahowho gave him yet another name which translates as Man Who Checks His Horses.  He had a sister or half-sisternamed Lozen or Dexterous Horse Thief who was born about 1840 and became a female warrior, seer and sorceress, and advisor to Vittorio who called her the “shield of the people.”

Some sources identified him as a Chiricahua, a division of the Apaches with which he was often allied and sometimes rode with.  This is probably due to ignorance of the complex clan, band, and tribal relations among the Apache.

By the early 1850’s Victorio was known to be traveling and fighting with the great Apache chief Mangus Coloradas in his wars against the old pueblos and new American settlements of what was by then American New Mexico Territory.  Kit Carson was one of the New Mexico militia leaders who did battle with the hostile Apache.  Among the other younger leaders in this war were Geronimo, Cochise, and Nana.  Victorio was one of Mangus Coloradas’s favorites and, apparently his son in law.

What Victorio’s exact role was during this time is also unclear.  The U.S. Army identified him as a chief in 1853 and Victorio put his mark on at least one official document with that designation.  But the army was unclear on the differences between war band leaders and tribal chiefs with broader authority and responsibilities with the various bands and clans.  Victorio may or may not have been both at this time.

We do know that he became, probably by assignment from Mangus Coloradas, the leader of a large war band of mixed Chihenne and Mescaleros whose civil chiefwas his brother-in-law known as Caballero.

After Mangus Coloradas was captured under a flag of truce at an 1863 parlay with the Army and subsequently murdered, Victorio became acknowledged leader of the Chihenne and acted as a sub-chief to Cochise in a long guerrilla war that lasted until 1872, when Cochise surrendered and agreed to let his people be put on reservations.

Victorio followed his leader’s example.  But over the next few years he and his band were put on least three different reservations, some more than once, despite his band’s request to live on traditional lands.  He found himself for the second time on the desolate San Carlos Reservation in Arizona, a barren desert where summer temperatures were regularly above 110̊, where there was no game, and farming was impossible.  His people were starving.  In 1879 he led his people off the reservation and headed back to his traditional territory. 

He and his band were now official renegades. Victorio’s War was on.  He and his 170 followers, later modestly reinforced by volunteers from other bands fed up with reservation life, were pursued by the Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th and 10th Cavalry across broad swaths of the border lands from New Mexico to west Texas.  Victorio raided isolated ranches, attacked wagon and baggage trains and skirmished with the Army while trying to avoid big engagements.  As the war went on Victorio’s fury grew and he took to torturing and mutilating prisoners creating a fearsome reputation and spreading panic. 

On September 16 at Las Animas Canyon in the Black Range Mountains of two companies of the 9th were ambushed and trapped by Victorio's warriors. They were rescued by the arrival of two additional companies and after a day of fighting, the soldiers broke off the engagement. Five soldiers, three scouts and thirty-two horses lay dead.

Victorio would slip across the Rio Grande to elude troops and raid his traditional enemies, the Mexicans.  His band ambushed and killed 15 vaqueros looking for cattle thieves and a second party of equal size sent to look for the first near the village of Carrizal, Chihuahua.  The Mexican Army joined in the pursuit and chased Victorio back to the river.  In the beginning of rare cooperation, the Mexicans telegraphed American headquarters that they were chasing Victorio and he was expected to cross the border into Texas.

From January to May 1880 troopers from the 9th engaged in numerous skirmishes with members of Victorio’s band.  Many engagements were no more than a quick exchange of gunfirebetween scouts and hit-and-run ambushes.  But sometimes Victorio would pin down an isolated patrol and a fight could last hours or days until the troopers were rescued.

In April, 1880, Victorio was credited with leading the Alma Massacre, a raid on settler homesteads around Alma, New Mexico. The warriors were finally driven off with the arrival of American soldiers from Fort Bayard.  Victorio continued his campaign with a rare attack on Fort Tularosa. In May the Texas based 10th Cavalry assumed the main task of battling Victorio.  Colonel Grierson devised a new strategy—instead of fruitlessly chasing the hostiles, he positioned troops at mountain passes and river fords likely to be used by Victorio in hopes of ambushing him.

On September 6 the trap almost worked at Rattlesnake Springs, Texas where troopers hid and surrounded a fresh water spring desperately needed by Victorio’s parched band.  Although he detected a trap, Victorio was so desperate for water that he made several attempts to reach the springs and also attacked an Army baggage train on the way to supply the troops.  Each time he was beaten back and finally had to give up the effort, retreating without water and the troops in pursuit.

Three days later troopers stumbled on Victorio’s main camp. After a skirmish with guards, the troopers captured 25 head of cattle and other supplies.  On September 11 two companies made contact with Victorio’s main band and went in hard pursuit.  But the Apaches were able to get across the Rio Grande before they could be captured.

At the rare invitation of the Mexican government, 10 companies of the 10th were allowed to enter Mexicoand were stationed along the south bankof the River to keep Victorio from crossing back into Texas.  Scouts from the 10th and Mexican forces located him on October 4, but kept their distance, monitoring his movements.

On October 9, the Mexican government told the US Army that their presence wasno longer necessary.  The 10th re-crossed the Rio Grande under protest.  Colonel Grierson appealed to Army Commanding General Phil Sheridan in Washingtonfor permission to return over the objection of Mexico.  Sheridan refused.

The Mexicans, knowing that the US Army orders were to “capture if possible”, wanted a free hand in eradicating their enemy.  On October 15, 1880 Colonel Jaoquin Terrazaand his troops surrounded Victorio’s camp and attacked. At the end of what became known as the Tres Castillos Massacre Victorio lay dead, with sixty warriors, and eighteen women and children. Sixty-eight women and children were taken prisoner.

As with so much else, exactly how Victorio died is in dispute.  Some claim an Indio scout shot him.  Others believe that the old warrior committed suicide rather than be killed by the Mexicans.

The survivors were rounded up, driven to the border, and dumped on the US Army.  They were exiled to distant reservations in Alabama, then in Floridawhere they were joined by Geronimo and his followers in 1888, and eventually to Oklahoma.

Hard to believe.  Just four years ago.  I already knew that Donald Trump was a slime ball, medicine show con man, school yard bully, and unctuous egomaniac.  But even I was shocked when his off camera Access Hollywood audio tape of him bragging to Billy Bush that he moved on a married woman—Entertainment Tonight host Nancy O’Dell—because when you are famous, you can do anything, “Grab ‘em by the pussy.”  The same tape was rife with bragging about ogling naked Miss Teen Universe contestants in their dressing room. You may remember.  It was a big deal at the time.  It seems almost quaint now.

Back then I had every confidence that the reptilian reality show host would easily be drubbed by Hillary Clinton in the upcoming election and that he would fade away amid scorn and ridicule.  How wrong I was.  Four years later as President of the United States he tops himself daily with new outrages which now threaten what is left of our democracy.  The litany of those is far too long to record here.  But you know what they are.

Lesson learned—don’t be too smug about what you might think is the Cheeto’s inevitable defeat this November.  It’s time to double down on effortsto turn out the vote everywhere and to target his enabling Republican toadies at every level as well. ‘Nuff said.

Back in 2016 just days after the audio tape made its big media splash I pounded out this verse which also exposes my own flawed masculinity.

No getting around the crap. 

My Two Cents

October 14, 2016

Ok, so I’m a stranger to locker rooms.

I was the furthest thing from a jock,

            a pasty flabby kid with glasses

            and a paperback perpetually

            stuffed in his back pocket.

In rancid and sweaty after-gym class

            dodging the snapped towels

            and hoots at my terror-shriveled wanger,

            I recall no chatting about grabbing pussy

            or sticking lounges down startled throats.

But hell, it was a long time ago,

            perhaps the memory is hazy

            or perhaps I lacked the passport

            to the elite spaces of strutting stars

            where such things maybe were lingua franca.

But I was an accredited correspondent

            to the sexual revolution

            even if a failed participant

            and remember free love and hippy chicks.

I did doctorial research in scurvy dives

            with the 7 am eye-opener drunks

            and the reek of stale beer, vomit, and Pall Malls

            and snickered along with some dirty jokes

            and ogled the unattainable babes on the

            beer calendars and TV shows

            flickering in the high corner above the cooler.

I have spent my hours with men

            on oily shop floors where machines

            whirred, roared, and clanked

            and you counted your fingers

            to make sure they were attached

            and we ate lunch off the roach coach

            brushing crumbs from our aprons

            and spun foolish yarns and lies.

I have languished in the Joint

            where a commissary Hustler

            was worth a carton of squares

            and drifted to sleep on lumpy cots

            to the moans of cons pulling their puds,

            my hand in unison with the rest.

I have been in the company of men

            where civilizing women were

            nowhere around to shame or constrain us.

I have heard and said fucked up things—

            but I never heard that sneering, swaggering

            unashamed boast of being a—

            let’s not pull punches—a predator

            or the bland assumption that any other man

            would be impressed and approving.

         I have never laid a hand or tongue on a woman

                        who was not willing to accepT

                        my fumbling advances—

                        hell, most of the time I was too shy

                        or too terrified to act when they practically

                        sent up flares of invitation.

            I may be a pig and a loser, Mr. Trump,

                        but I have never disgraced all swine

—Patrick Murfin

Tom Mix was big in every way.  Bigger than you can imagine.  A handsome, barrel chested man.  The biggest star.  The biggest hero to a generation or two of boys.  As big as the enormous hats he wore.  He even died in a big, flashy way speeding down an Arizona highway in a fancy open Cord 812 Phaeton on October 13, 1940 at just 60 years of age.

Thomas Hezekiah Mix was born January 6, 1880 in Mix Run, Pennsylvania where his family, as the place name infers, had deep roots.  It was a small, unincorporated village in the remote north central part of the state near what became the Elk State Forest.  His father was a stable master and the boy grew up around horses and was an unmatched rider by his early teens.

He also was enamoredof the small traveling circus shows that came through town.  He dreamed of running awayto join the circus and practiced actsin the barn—including using his sister as a target for knife throwing.  That got him a good whipping from his father.

Restless and eager for real adventure. Mix rushed to enlist in the Army for the Spanish American War under the name Thomas Edwin Mix—he was glad to lose Hezekiah—just the first of many reinventions.  He never saw action in that brief war, but did become a sergeant of artillery serving in the Philippines in 1900-’01 although he was never actually deployed against the Filipino insurrectionists.

Back stateside he met a young woman, Grace I. Allinand married her while on furlough in July 1902.  He never returned to duty and was officially listed as a deserter that November.  Desertion from the peacetime Army was not uncommon in those days and unless the AWOL soldier was nabbed close to base or picked up by police somewhere on other charges the military did not have the resources to pursue arrests.  Mix often referred to his Army service in later years, including allowing people to assume that he was in Cuba, perhaps even as a Rough Rider and some people in the Army must have been aware of his status as he rose to fame.  But no action was ever taken against him and the Army afforded him a veteran’s funeral with full honors.  The revelationof his status as a deserter came only when serious biographers began to research his purposefully murky early years.

Mix’s marriage didn’t last as long as his enlistment.  It was annulled in less than a year, probably because he had run off to Oklahoma to become a cowboy.  A master horseman already and marksmanwith both a rifle and a handgun as a result of a youth spent roaming the Pennsylvania woods and as soldier, he slid as effortlessly into his new identity as a Colt .44 into a well-oiled holster.  In no time at all he was a top hand with a growing reputation.  But he also was something of a showman from the beginning, splitting time between real ranch work and playing the cowboy for a young nation still enthralled with tales of the West.  In 1903 he turned up as drum major of the Oklahoma Cavalry Band, at the St. Louis World’s Fair.

The next year he was back in Oklahoma in the dual roles of bartender and Town Marshall of Dewey.  This short stint as a part time lawmanwould eventually loom much larger in the legend he created about himself.

Always the lady’s man, Mix married again 1905 to Kitty Jewel Perinne of whom little is known but whose name makes theimagination dance.  That marriage, too, fizzled in divorce after a year.  A certain pattern in domestic relationships was beginning toemerge.

The same year as his marriage Mix turned up in a troop of 50 cowboy riders led by the legendary marshal of Deadwood and Rough Rider Captain Seth Bullock in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade.  Many of the other riders were also former Rough Riders, leading many to conclude that Mix was as well—an assumption he never did anything to disclaim.

By 1906 Mix was working on the biggest and most famous of all Oklahoma ranches, the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch.  The sprawling ranch, which bred horses as well as raising cattle, employed hundreds of cowboys.  One of the wranglers was a roping wonder named Will Rogers. 

After the spring round-up hands on the ranch traditionally conducted their own cowboy contests—rodeos they would come to be called—displaying riding, roping, and shooting skills.  Up in Cheyenne, Wyoming they had already discovered that such cowboy games were great draws for tourists whose appetitefor cowboy adventure had been whettedby Buffalo Bill Cody and other wild west show troupes.   The 101 outfit had also been contracted to provide stock to those shows and to the rodeos springing up around the west.  Their own private competition was itself opened to the public and began to draw crowds.  The Miller Bros launched their own touring 101 Ranch Wild West Show in 1906. And Tom Mix was, from the beginning the star. 

He also competed in other rodeos and in another type of completion called cowboy games where riding and shooting events were combined.  He was named national champion in those in Prescott, Arizona in 1909, and Canyon City, Colorado in 1910.  In the meantime he had married yet again, this time to horsewoman Olive Stokes on January 10, 1909 in Medora, North Dakota.  Together they appeared in other shows including the Widerman Show in Amarillo, Texas, Seattle’s Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, and Will A. Dickey’s Circle D Ranch.  His childhood dreams of becoming a circus star were folding into his life as a cowboy

Mix was back at the 101 Ranch in 1910 when the Selig Polyscope Company, an early motion picture studio, contracted with the Miller Bros to provide stock and performers for a series of one reel films. 

Westerns were already a hot commodity in the fledgling film industry.  The firstAmerican movie with a plot, the 12 minute long Great Train Robbery in 1903 set the stage for a flood of oaters. One of the leading actors in that film, Bronco Billy Anderson became the first movie star that the public knew byname and was by then producing, directing, and staring in popular westerns at Essenay Studios in Chicago.

Mix first appeared as part of the ensemble in a short Selig film, The Cowboy Millionaire in 1909.  The following year he was featured in a sort of documentary called Ranch Life in the Great Southwest which showed off his prodigious skills as a rider, roper, and rough and tumblecowpoke.  The movie was Selig’s biggest hit to date.

In no time Mix was not only being billed as the star, he was writing and even directing his own films, which introduced elements of comedy and romance to the action mix.  Subsequent films were not shot on the 101 ranch but at the Selig studios in the Edendale district of Los Angeles and later on western sets built at Las Vegas, New Mexico. 

In a few short years Mix made over 100 mostly single reel shorts for Selig, and some two reelers late in the association as the single reel short fell out of favor for dramatic films.  Beautifulteenage actress Victoria Forde became his favorite leading lady and, inevitably, his lover.  After 10 years with Olivia, he divorced her and married Forde the following year.  Mix now had three ex-wivesand a daughter, Ruth, born in 1912, who he had to support as well as a current one—a monetary burden that both drained him and made him ambitious for fat paychecks.

As his marriage was crumbling so did Selig studios, which had few hits beyond Mix.  The company went bankrupt and William Fox bought the Edendale studios.  He also signed Mix and Forde to very generous contracts guaranteeing Mix control of his own films and a dedicated production unit.  That was in 1917.  Mix would stay with the studio until 1928 making both him and Fox wealthy beyond either’s dreams.  And in the process would redefine the film western in startling new ways.

Up until this time whatever wild plot and adventures, western films tried with greater or lesser success, for realism in costume, accouterments, and settings.  Not surprisingly.  A lot of their audience could clearly recall the “Old West” and what it looked like.  Real western heroes like Buffalo Bill Cody himself or legendary Oklahoma lawman Bill Tilghmanwere showing up in films.  Bronco Billy was always careful of realistic setting.

Over at Famous Players-Lasky (the future Paramount) the biggest western star of the day, a former New York stage Shakespearian actor named William S. Hart was a notorious sticklerfor complete authenticity in his films.

Even his own Selig pictures had mostly been rooted in the realities of ranch life.

Mix, the real cowboy, rodeo rider and circus performer had no illusions about his ability as an actor.  But he had learned a thing or two about grabbing an audience.  He knew that colorful costumes drew attention in big arenas.  Instead of dusty, worn working clothes, he now appearedin highly tailored costumes—tight trousers tucked into richly decorated high heeled cowboy boots, two pearl handled revolvers in tooled belts strapped to his hips, crisp shirts often double breastedwith decorative piping around a yoke and arrowhead slit pockets, silk kerchiefs knotted at the neck.  And above all, an enormous hat.  No cowboy ever rode the range in anything like it.

About that hat…Photos of working cowboys from the 1870’s on show that they wore a wide variety of headgear.  Usually wide brimmed hats but depending on the region, personal taste, and what was available at the general store when they needed one the sombreros varied with peaked crowns or flat ones, stiff brims or floppy ones, brims curledor slouched or pushed up in front—a popular look borrowed from cavalry troopers.  Around the turn of the century cowboys on the northern part of the range began to sport what was called the Montana crease, a hat with a high crown peaked in back sloping forward with a center crease.  This became the famous ten gallon hat described in dime novels.  Along the southern border with Mexico, some Texas cowboys sported a trimmed down version of the vaquero’s sombrero with a high, round crownand wide brim turned up all around.  Mix began to wear specially made Stetsons combining both styles.  They were big, flashy hats—he wore them in white or black interchangeably.  Soon other cowboy stars like Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard, and Col. Tim McCoy were wearing them. 

In a case of life imitating art, they took off with real working cowboys as well, supplanting other styles for a decade or so.  Cowboys also saved up for fancy shirts and bootsto wear to town on Saturday night or to dances, going back to ordinary working clothes the rest of the week.  Even they wanted to be Tom Mix.

Mix’s films were filled with humor.  He seemed not to take himself too seriously in stark contrast to the grim probity of William S. Hart’s heroes.  And they were chock full of action from the beginning to the end, lots of chases, trick riding, fist fights, leaps from great heights, and daring-do stuntsof all kinds.  And Mix did all of the stunts himself, with the camera catchinghim in the kind of close-ups that actors who used stunt doubles could not duplicate. 

Audiences ate it all up.  Every Fox film seemed to top the previous one.  He did six or seven films a year now, far down from the hectic pace of the Selig one reelers.  He had a budget for large casts, impressive scenery, big props like steam engines, paddle wheel river boats, epic wagon trains, mass herds of real long horns—whatever he needed.

Fox built him his own facility at the Edendale studios, a 12 acre set nick named Mixville with “… a complete frontier town, with a dusty street, hitching rails, a saloon, jail, bank, doctor’s office, surveyor’s office, and the simple frame houses typical of the early Western era.”  Also on the lot was an Indian village with tepeesset against plaster mountains that looked real on film, and a whole ranch set up.  When scripts called for it Mix could shoot on location in California, Nevada, and Arizona.

A big part of the show was now Mix’s horse, Tony the Wonder Horse, a big handsome chestnut with a white blaze face and white stockings.  Tony could perform all manner of tricksand stunts including untying Mix’s hands, opening gates, loosening his reins, rescuing Mix from fire, jumping from one cliff to another, and running after trains.  Tony became so popular that he was sometimes co-billed with Mix and had his name in the title of three films.  His popularity inspired other equine co-stars—Ken Maynard’s Tarzan, Gene Autry’s Champion, Roy Rogers’ Trigger, Hopalong Cassidy’s Topper, and the Lone Ranger’s Silver.

In his first films at Fox Forde was his co-star and love interest.  She decided to retire and devote herself to homemaking with the coming the couple’s daughterThomisina (Tommie) in 1922.  After that a parade of beauties took turns being rescued and swept off their feet by the hero.

As Mix’s films became more and more popular, his salary grew.  He made $4,000 a week in 1922 and just three years later Fox was glad to shell out $7,500 a week—an enormous sum at the time.  And Mix spent it as fast as he made it, always paying his share to his train of ex-wives.  He always wore his immaculate trade mark Stetsons and expensive tailored clothing, much of it western style.  He drove the latest, fastest, and most expensive cars.  He erected one of the biggest mansions in Hollywood with his own stables and an electric sign with his name on the roof.  He liked to make the rounds of nightclubs, studio parties, premiers, and film events.  He and William S. Hart, and a young filmmaker named John Ford, regularly played cards and drank with legendary lawman, gambler, and sporting man Wyatt Earp.  Mix was a pall bearer at Earp’s funeraland famously broke down and cried.

When Fox refused yet another big raise, Mix let his contract there lapse in 1928.  He was tiring of movies and beginning to feel his age and the effects of accumulated injuries from years of doing his own stunts.  Joseph P. Kennedy offered him a fat contract to make films with his independent studio, Film Booking Office of America, soon to be merged into RKO.  He did his last silent films there that year.   The films also featured his first daughter Ruth. They were money makers for the small studio, but without the vast network of Fox theaters, couldn’t generate as many viewers as his earlier films.

Mix decided to quit films and return to his first love—the circus.  Ruth joined his act.  He was the headline star of the Sells-Floto Circus in the 1929, 1930 and 1931seasons, pulling down $20,000 a week—more than he ever made in pictures.

In 1931 Mix’s marriage to Victoria Forde ended, likely because of the appearance of Mabel Hubbell Ward who became wife number 5 in ’32.  The expense of yet another ex-wife lured him back to pictures when Universal offered him a contract to make talkies with complete control of his production unit.  He made nine films for Universal.  Legend has it that they were failures because Mix had a high voice.  Untrue on both counts.  All of the films were box office successes, and Mix had a fine, rich baritone voice.  He was not, however, an actor adept at reading lines and he knew it.  His performances seemed more stilted than in his silents.

Both he and his beloved horse Tony were injured.  He retired Tony and brought on Tony Jr.  But it wasn’t the same.  His own injuries were becoming painful.  Mix decided to retire from film once again and return to the circus.

This time he toured with the Sam B. Dill Circus, which he bought out and re-named the Tom Mix Circus with Ruth, who had starred in a score of Poverty Row studio B westerns and serials herself, as his partner.  He toured with the show in 1935 and then went off on a European tour leaving Ruth in charge at home.  Without his draw, with then Depression hurting ticket sales, and the expense of a large troupe, the Tom Mix Circus failed while he was away.  Probably unfairly, he blamed his daughter causing a permanent rift between them.  When he died she was cut out of what was left of hisestate.

Mix had been approached several times to do his own radio show.  But the money offered was far less than he could make doing either film or circus.  Finally Ralston Purina offered him a deal for a radio series built around his name and character, but in which he would not have to perform.  Tom Mix would be played by a series of actorsduring the show’s long run from 1933 to ’51.  Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooters starred Artells Dickson, Jack Holdenfrom 1937, Russell Thorsen  in the early ‘40s, and Joe “Curley” Bradley from ’44 to the end of the series.  Country comedian and story teller George Gobel was one of the supporting players.

Ralston also issued a highly popular series of Tom Mixcomic books and featured his image oncereal boxes.  Through the radio show, comics, and in the early ‘50’s television airings of his old movies including his silent films new generations continued to idolizeMix even after his death.

Faced with big bills from the collapse of the circus, Mix was lured back to movies one more time to do a 15 episode serial, The Miracle Rider for tiny Poverty Row studio Mascot Pictures.  The studio paid him $40,000 for just four weeks of work.  It paid off for them.  They grossed over $1 million from the Saturday matinee nickels and dimes of a new generation of adoring fans.  It was Mix’s last film appearance.

Mix spent his last years making personal appearancesaround the U.S. and spending money he no longer could replace.

On October 4, 1940 Mix had been larking around Arizona.  He stopped to visit an old pal, Pima County Sheriff Ed Nichols in Tucson.  Later he stopped by the Oracle Junction Inn, a saloon and casino where he had a fewdrinks and called his agent to enquire about future bookings.  Then it was off to Phoenix.  He was speeding down State Route 79 at an estimated 80 miles an hour when he came upon a bridge that had been washed away by a flash flood.  He slammed on the breaks skidding on the loose gravel.  An aluminum suitcase stuffed with money, traveler’s checks and jewelrytore loose from the luggage rack on the trunk behind him and slammed into Mix’s head, shattering his skull.  The car turned over and slid into the dry arroyo but he was already dead.

After an elaborate Hollywood funeral with full military honors, Mix was laid to rest in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California.  Despite earning over $6 million in his movie career he left only a few thousand dollars—and a lot of debt in his estate.  His wife, ex-wife Victoria Forde, and daughter Thomisina each received small bequests.

Tony Jr. out lived his master, but died exactly two years later to the day.

Mix was the inspiration of songs, and literature.  Darryl Ponicsan wrote a cult favorite novel, Tom Mix Died for Your Sins.  Hoaxer Clifford Irving imagined Mix joiningthe Mexican Revolution Tom Mix and Pancho Villa.    Philip José Farmer made him a leading character as Jack London’s traveling companion in two of his Riverworld science fiction novels. 

Bruce Willis played Mix teaming up with James Garner’s Wyatt Earp to solve a Hollywood mystery in the 1988 Blake Edwards film Sunset. 

In the ultimate pop culture tribute, Mix is one of the faces on the cover of the Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The cultural, ethnic, and moral tug of warbetween the American holiday Columbus Day and an insurgent Indigenous People’s Day has taken over new dimensionsin this year of Black Lives Matter protest which have widened to include other persecuted and endangered minoritiesand the stifling, isolating Coronavirus pandemic.  The Indigenous celebration continue to roll on gathering momentum as more municipalities, school districts, states, and other jurisdiction drop the old holiday for the new observance.  This summer as BLM activists began pulling down Confederate monuments, Native Americans and their allies were inspired to do the same to the arch symbol of colonialist oppression, the alleged Great Navigator.  Several monuments were torn down, defaced, or removed by local authorities. 

In Chicago where marchers failed to pull down a prominent statue on Columbus Drive in Downtown lakeshore Grant Park and tagged it with graffiti Mayor Lori Lightfoot ordered the statue temporarily removed along with two others in neighborhood parks.  Naturally there was also a backlash uproar from the Italian-American community, simple traditionalists, and promoters of respect for “European culture” A/K/A White nationalists.

Meanwhile most annual Columbus Day observances including those ubiquitous parades and cultural events have been canceled due to the pandemic.  That might prevent some of the confrontations that have become common.  When they return, and they inevitably will, most will not have government sponsorship or official approval.  They will be private, First Amendment protected affairs.

The ultimate fate of those monuments is unclear although it is highly unlikely the Grant Park statue will ever be returned.  Perhaps the statues could be donatedto some Italian American civic organization or museum for display on private property.  Some think that at least one of the other statues might be quietly restored to a neighborhood park where it might not draw much attention.

International Indigenous People’s Day is celebrated on August 8 in most of the Americas and in other parts of the world.  I have blogged the still spreading and growing recognition that has its official origins in the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007.  But in the United States Native Americans have been staging actions, protests, and alternative events to Federal Holiday on the Second Monday in October for decades.

That’s right, your calendar probably marked yesterday, October 9, as Columbus Dayin recognition of Cristoforo Colombo/Cristóbal Colón/Christopher Columbus.  I’ve blogged about him, too, and his alleged discovery—alleged because he didn’t know where he was going, “found” what was never lost, claimed what wasn’t his to take, and didn’t even know where the hell he was.  When just about everyone else in Europe had figured out that he never reached the East Indies or Asia he continued to lie about it.

None-the-less the mercenary mariner was rewarded with fancy titles—Admiral of the Ocean Sea for one—and made Viceroyover half the damned world.  And he screwed that up by being so brutal that he virtually wiped out the once numerous Carib peoples who inhabited the islands under his immediate effective sway.  He also bullied and oppressed potential rivals—would be Conquistadors of even richer realms on the mainland, many of whom had better connections at Courtthan a Genoan hireling.  He was stripped of his titles, wealth confiscated, and shipped to Spain in disgrace and chains.

Not much to celebrate there.

Yet despite the fact that Columbus never set foot in North America—the closest he got was wandering around portions of Central America after being abandoned by mutineers and quite typically lost—he somehow became an iconic folk figure and symbol of the New World to the English and the overwhelmingly Protestant colonists hugging to the Atlantic shore far to the north of any of his voyages. 

Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian sailor with even less to justify it, swooped in and got his name attached to two continents just because he knew the right cartographer.  But Columbia was a popular alternative name for Western Hemisphere lands and some Patriots wanted to adopt it officially for their new country.  Think of the song, once almost an unofficial national anthem, Columbia the Gem of the Ocean and other evidence.  When Thomas Jefferson’s pal Joel Barlow, a diplomat and literary dabbler, wanted to create a national epic poem he churned out The Columbiad, a turgid contemplationof Columbus and the new world.

Around the 400th anniversary of the alleged discovery in 1892 interest in him was elevated by events around the world, but particularly at Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition.  American Catholics—a struggling and despised minority—looked to the notoriously pious Columbus who had slaughtered all of those natives in the guise of converting them to the One True Church to establish their bona fides as worthyAmericans.  Thus the Knights of Columbus became the Catholic answer to the WASP Masonic Lodges.

But it was urban Italians, among the last European immigrants to become White,  in the big cities of the East Coast and Midwest who made Columbus Day and lavish annual parades an answer to the earlier immigrants—especially the Irish—in their struggle for a fat slice of the patronage and privilege pie of the Democratic Party machines.

As protests against honoring a figure who represented centuries of land theft, colonial subjugation, genocide, and cultural annihilation has grown, support for the holiday has waned.  City after City and several States have officially dumped Columbus Day and most have adopted some form on Indigenous Peoples Day in its stead.  Support had dwindled to indignant Italian civic organizations and the kind of cultural fuddy-duddies who cannot stomach change of any kind.

More recently, however, a sub-set of the Alt-Right and neo-fascist movements who claim to honor and preserve European culture and secure its dominance in American society, have begun to make war on the anti-Columbus Day warriors, especially attacking Native Americans and a “cultural elite of race traitors”.

Anyway, all of that is more than I intended to write about Columbus.  By now you know the story.  So I celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day today.  I hope you do too.

Early Voting has already started in Illinois we here at Heretic Rebel, a Thing to Flout Election Central are overdue in presenting our coveted Vote 2020 endorsements.  To save time, you will find no surprises here.  We are recommending top to bottom Democrats for every office where they are running and skipping voting on contests with no Democrats.  The entire Republican Party is now so tainted by Donald Trump, xenophobia, racism, misanthropy, homophobia, religious zealotry, science denial, anti-democratic authoritarianism, Randian claptrap, raging incompetence, batshit crazy woowooism, and general smarminess that candidates running on that ticket have forfeited any legitimacy.

As is our custom, we will drill down the Illinois ballot from the Presidential race, state wide contests, U.S. House of Representative races, State Legislative races, McHenry County wide races, County Board Contests, and Judgeships.

We will start with referendum questions.

Eliminate the McHenry County Coroner as an Elective Office—There is a touch of political grandstandingabout this referendum question backed by County Board President Jack Franks, but there is also sound governance policy.  An elected coroner is a vestige of English law like the county sheriff.   It served tolerably well as long as local, often rural, counties had light caseloads and before modern forensic pathology opened up new investigative techniques.  Traditionally the office was often filled by a funeral home director and/or mortician whose business often profited from transporting and handling bodies.  When the elected and highly incompetent Coroner resigned last year leaving behind a mess uncovered in investigationsJack Franks declined to propose someone to fill the vacancy until the next election.  The duties of the Coroner devolved to the Sheriff and eventually he appointed a Sheriff’s police sergeant to manage the position.  Franks proposed eliminating the elected position effective after the November election.  Currently the Coroner is at best an office administers who hires pathologists on contract to conduct autopsies and death investigations. An appointed coroner would effectively be a medical examiner qualified to do his own autopsies and investigations at savingsto the tax payer. The Republicans are intent on preserving a sinecure for their hack politicos and a modest horde of patronage positions.  They are running Michael Rein, a chiropractor and former County Board member.  The Libertarians also have a dog in the race while the Democrats declined to slate a candidate.  To secure their bailiwick the Republicans are littering the County with Vote No signs that absurdly claim to “fight corruption.”  We urge you to vote to professionalize the office.