It will be a sunny, warm day in McHenry County, Illinois.  A slight haze from wildfires scorching the Northwest will keep the sky from its most perfect blue.  After some rain, we are reverting to a drought.  It has been a summer of emergence from more than a year of some degree of pandemic lock down or another.  People are gathering again, maskless, and looking for long delayed good times.  My wife and I will go to a big outdoor event for the first time—a Kane County Cougars minor league baseball game this evening.  But we worry, as a more contagious and lethal version of the Coronavirus has cases, hospitalizations, and death on the rise again that this might be only a temporary respite.  Temporary or not the pleasant break encourages the mind to wander to other summers long ago and far away.

Take those in Cheyenne, Wyoming almost 60 years ago. Which one to pick?  Each was a little different as I drifted from childhood into my early teens.  Let’s pick, say, 1963 for no good reason other than it popped into my head first.  I would have been 14 years old, between years at Cary Junior High.

We lived, as we had since a traumatic move in second grade, in a small ranch house with a single car open carport on Cheshire Drive, the last block after a steep hill before the town suddenly ended in open prairie.  The long runway of the airport ran on the other side of a barbed wire fencealong the alley behind our house.  You could while away hours some days watching the National Guard play with their Air Force hand-me-down F-86 fighters, or United Airlines 707 and Caravelle jet liners from Denver practicing take offs and landing over and over with their pilot trainees.  But except for the jets, which did not fly every day, and the ever-present wind, it was a remarkably quiet neighborhood where the meadowlarks sang their sweet song from the fence wireevery morning and evening.

That summer the old neighborhood gang who had spent our summers in endless imaginary games of backyard war, or cowboys and Indians with a little hide-and-seekand backyard baseball with red rubber balls thrown in, was drifting apart.  My twin brother Tim, the good looking one, had gone off with the older boys led by King Van Winkle.  I was allowed, grudgingly, to tag along occasionally, but was not really welcome.

That summer they resurrected a half tumbled down dug out they had built the year before in a futile attempt to turn a stretch of prairie burr, sage brush, button cactus, and tumbleweed into a ball diamond.   This year by scouring/looting construction sites for 2x4s, 1x6 planking, and plywood they had built the most elaborate two-story fort ever from which to base their operations, which were not always as innocent as a Little Rascals short.

There was a crawl through door with a school combination lock on the hasp—I was never trusted with the combination—leading to the dug-out first floor.  Then a trap doorled to the second level, which was divided into two small rooms.  Since the first floor would fill with water after a rare thunderstorm, the second floor was where they kept their treasures—girly magazines and liquor pilfered from their parents—and did their most secret stuff.  Which was mostly smoking.  You could see clouds of smoke ooze between the ill-fitting wall planks and smell the place a hundred yards down wind on a good day.  I was told King knew certain girls who would come over and put-out for booze and cigarettes.  This may or may not have been true.  There was also card playing, the stakes often being stuff shoplifted from local stores or liberated from open garages.  It was that kind of place. 

In late summer, just before school started, some irate neighbor, maybe the father of one of those legendary girls, pushed the place down with his pickup truck.

Meanwhile the younger kids, led by Joe Miranda from just down the block and his hoard of siblings, were still playing the kid games that had lost interest for me most days.  Or they were busy on afternoons with Little League.  I had washed out of baseball—the only organized sport that ever interested me—a couple of years earlier after I suffered the humiliation of being sent down to a lower age group because I was ball shy in the outfield, slow on the bases, and unable to connect at the plate except for dribbling ground balls that faster kids might have beaten out, but which I never did.

My Dad, who used to play lazy catch with me and my brother after dinner on summer evenings, was mostly gone that summer.  He had finally been forced out of his job as Secretary of the Wyoming Travel Commission, the last Republican agency head hold-over after the Democrats took over the Governor’s mansion.  He had converted the bedroom my brother and I used to share into the office the important sounding Willard Murfin and Associates—but there were no associates, just Dad.  He was busy running from Omaha to Salt Lake City trying to organize the Highway 30/Interstate 80 Association, recruiting motel and restaurant owners, local Chambers of Commerce, and the operators of local tourist attractions.  The Association would hire his fledgling companyto promote tourism along the route.  It was a struggle and he was clearly worried that this venture would not work out.

Mom, no-longer a Den Mother, had immersed herselfin one of her new projects.  That year I think it was making copper jewelry, or maybe it was reupholstering all our living room furniture with nubby, uncomfortable nylon fabric and then moving on to recover the neighbors’ living rooms.  She was too busy to be much concerned with me as long as I was home for dinner.  Which was good, because after one of these manic spurts of activity was over, the depression took over and she went, well, crazytaking a keen interest in my many deficiencies and embarrassments to the family and meting out discipline with beatingswith the sharp wire handle of a flyswatter against by naked ass.

So, I was pretty much on my own that summer.  Which suited me just fine.  My nerdiness was ready to come full flower left on my own.

Since Dad had taken over our upstairs bedroom, Tim and I were happily ensconced in the unfinished basement, which Dad had been puttering on ever since we moved in.  He had managed to get up the paneling on half the exterior wallsof the basement and studded out the future rooms.  These were now divided by hanging up some of Mom’s evidently endless supply of chenille bedspreads.  Dad had also got around to putting up pegboard on the furnace room walls to hold his tools. 

Tim made his bedroom in the windowless corner of the basement on the other side of the peg board.  He had painted the walls black and illuminated his room with strings of Christmas tree lights and decoratedwith his collection of vintage monster movie photos and model cars.  He had custody of the record player.  He was officially the hippest 14-year-old in Cheyenne. 

My room across the bedspread had the light of a window well in the morning.  My books were on steel shelving and a little steel study desk with an attached lampfrom Woolworth’s sat in one corner.  I had the family’s old wood cabinet Atwater-Kent radio with shortwave band which I used mostly to listen to far-away night baseball games or to try and pick up foreign stations like the BBC or Radio Havana. 

The rest of the basement was divided between the laundry room and the denwhere we had the old Motorola console TV and a couple of chrome and Naugahyde chairs dad had got from some friend when his office closed.  My personal collection of Time Magazines was stacked on a low table.  Our old toy box sat neglected at the far end of the room.  Mostly we watched the Tonight Show down there after our parents had gone to bed.

On a typical summer morning I rose late—9 or 10 and made my own breakfast, usually a bowl of Cheerios and buttered toast with strawberry jam.  I had to attend to our black dachshund Fritz von Schlitz.  I usually unchained him from his doghouse and took him for a walkthen policed the yard for poop.  

My other summer chore was lawn care, for which I was paid $5 a week.  Mowing had become easier that year.  Dad had finally replaced the old push mower with power machine from the Coast-to-Coast store.  It was powder blue and I could get it started after a struggle.  With this improvement I was able to finish the whole lawn in two or three hours.  Previously I would work about two hours a day doing part of the lawn and when I was finished I would have to start all over again.  This freed up my days considerably.

In the evenings I had to water which meant putting out little sprinklers in the small front yard but setting up a major irrigation project in the long back yard that stretched toward the airport.  I had one of those rotating sprinklers that turned every time the stream of water was struck by a little arm—you know the type.  And on many hoses strung together I ran a cast-iron crawling tractor.  I would have to move the hoses every couple of hours.

But all of that left my day mostly free and I was on my own to roam Cheyenne at will.

Picture me that summer as I set off on one of my daily trips.  I had outgrownthe old gray felt hat pinned up on one side with an Army insignia in honor of my childhood hero, Theodore Rooseveltand his Rough Riders.  And Dad’s World War II oversees capthat I had worn during a later period of re-enacting the old war moviesI saw on TV.  I was going for a more grown up look.  The hat of choice that summer was battered white Panama strawwith a snap brim I had obtained at some thrift store.  My glasses were plastic tortoise shell with thick lenses.  I was wearing last year’s warm weatherschool clothes.  Mom had bought six identical short sleeve sport shirts in pale green, tan, and powder blue at J.C. Penny for a couple of bucks apiece.  They were getting a little ratty and too tight.  In the breast pocket I had a plastic pocket protector from a gas station in which I carried a Schaefer cartridge fountain pen, and a Scripto mechanical pencil, a little leatherette covered notebook, and a pocket comb.  I was surely the only kid in Cheyenne who went abroad on a summer day ready for school.  My jeans were by then worn out at the knee and repaired by Mom’s iron-on patches.  I had a coin purse and a Cub Scout pocketknifein one pocket and a bill-fold in a back pocket with a picture of Ava Gardner still in the little widow containing, if I was lucky, a dollar or two.  A dingy white handkerchief hung limply out of the same pocket for wiping my face of sweat on a hot day.  In the other back pocket I jammed a paperback book.  The look was finished off with black Wellington boots, the toes by then nicked and scuffed, the heels worn down.

Sometimes I hopped on my red and white Firestone coaster break bike with the wire basket on the handlebars, especially if I planned to bring anything home.  But usually, I set off on foot.  I always enjoyed walking, just ambling along gaping at anything that caught my attention.  Among my frequent destinations were downtownfor a visit to Woolworths and maybe pieat the Luncheonette if I had money to spare or to the Carnegie Public Library to drop off or search for books.  Both were a good walk from home, close to two hours at my pace.

But most days I headed over to Holiday Park over by Lincolnway where Highway 30 came through town.  On the way I would likely stop at Hoy’s Drug/MainDiner to look at the magazine racks and check out the rotating paperback book rack for new arrivals.  That summer I was spending a lot of my money on those books—Bantam, Cardinal, Dell, Gold Seal, and Fawcett editions, mostly 35 cents each but 50 cents for a big fat one.  That’s where I procured the books I stuffed in my jeans.  While there I might, if flush and the day was warm, get a black cow at the soda fountain. 

It was a good hike to Holiday Park but on a hot day I was rewarded by the ample shade of many mature trees.  If there were no little kids at the playground, or any adults to see me, I would stop to push the merry-go-round with the diamond plate deck, each pie wedge shaped section painted a different color.  When it was going as fast as I could make it spin, I would jump on and lay on my back looking at the arching cottonwoods and the puffy white clouds against the blue sky whirl.  I might amble over the swings, too, and pumping as hard as I could swig up even with the bars, leaping off at the very top of the arc when I was finished.  But never if anyone could see.  It would have spoiled my new adult image.

That was the summer that they rolled the Big Boy locomotive, one of the biggest steam engines ever built, down Lincolnway from the Union Pacific yards and shops by putting rails down in front of it and picking them up from behind.  I had watched that operation and watched them push the engine down a slope into a corner of the parkwhere it was put on display.  Back then it was not fenced off and I could go over and climb aboard, lay my hand upon the throttle and poke my head out the side window of the cab.  As a much younger boy I had seen these huge engines come through town and make up the two-milelong trains they hauled over Sherman Hill.  I had watched them take water from the tanks and waved at the conductor and brakeman in their yellow caboose.  

But those things were a distraction to my real destination—a certain ancient willow tree that stretched a comfortable, sturdy arm over the muddy waters of the pond the city grandiosely called Lake Minnehaha in the center of the park.  There was a perfect perch.  I settled in with the book from my jeans for two or three hours of uninterrupted—except by occasional daydreaming—reading.

And what was I reading that summer?  Well, I remember Horn of the Hunter: The Story of an African Safariby Robert Ruak, a memoir with—the boy sang hallelujah—sex scenes as well as hairy chested hunting in the Hemingway mold.  Indulging my taste for history and war there were editions of Bruce Canton’s Stillness at Appomattox and The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan.  On the fiction side of the same interest there was Fifty-Five Days at Pekingwith the cover featuring the lovely Ms. Garner and rugged Charlton Hesston, and Hemmingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls from my mother’s bookshelf, not the drug store rack.  I also enjoyed a good laugh.  Nothing did that better than Leonard Wimberley’s The Mouse that Roared and Jean Kern’s The Snake Had All the Lines.  And I picked up some show business memoirs—Jack Parr’s I Kid You Not comes to mind.  There were more—I plowed through a lot of books, good and bad that summer.

In 1536 the Mary Rose already had 26 years of service which made her old for a heavy warship in an era when worms,barnacles, and dry rot took a toll on hulls, keels, and decking in addition to the great hazards of foundering in heavy weather, running aground, or being sunk or captured in combat.  But she was the core of English King Henry VIII’s small personal navy and for many of her years his heaviest ship laden with a huge complement of cannon.  She had survived combat, mostly against the French in the naval adventures that the Tudor monarch had been able to undertake against his much more formidable Continental enemies.

But she had been in idle reserve for years when she was hauled to dry dock almost completely rebuilt that year with a treasury newly swollen by the King’s seizure and closure of the monasteries. Records of her original conformation and of the reconstruction are sketchy but naval historians and archeologists believe she was probably re-planked with fresh heavy oak from the hull to the decks.  In the process at least one additional deck was added giving her a total of four, the distinctive high fore and aft castles of a carrack raised even more.  She was one of the first war ships outfitted with a new innovation—gun ports—that added two more levels of artillery platforms to the open deck.  In the new form she carried between 78 and 91 guns, although some were light deck swivel guns meant for anti-personneluse.  That was an enormous wallop, although the in-line battle formations that made the use of broadsides so deadly had not yet been developed.  She would have to try to deploy those guns in virtual free-for-all close quarter melees.  In the process of this her tonnage increased about 500 to between 700 and 900 and her complement of crew, soldiers, and gunners swollen considerably.

Henry must have been pleased.  He made Mary Rose the flagship of his navy and set her off in service of his dreamof restoring England tomajor power status.

At the turn of the 16th Century, England, having lost all but a toeholdof its French holdings and having been embroiled for years in the dynastic War of the Roses had been reduced to being a peripheral European power.  Mighty France was in the ascendency, Spain was newly unified and had begun to fatten from the plunder of gold and silver from the New World, and its Hapsburg dynasty also had control of the seafaring Low Countries. 

The English were far from the world dominant sea power they would become.  Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty at the end of the War of the Roses was able to maintain only a small personal navy—five or six reasonably heavy ships.  In time of war merchant vessels were hastily and sometimes unsuitably adapted as war ships and small fleets light galleys—the staple of naval warfare since Roman times were slapped together.  Most fighting would be done within sight of shore—often in support of raids, invasions, and land campaigns. 

Open water fleet confrontations were rare, but with the rapid development of global empires would become more important.  Most open ocean combat was commerce raidingand conducted by privateers.

At the end of his reign Henry VII had a very small personal navy and only two sizable warships.  Circumstantial evidence indicates that he ordered the construction of the Mary Rose and a slightly smaller companion Peter Pomegranate to join his carracks Regent and Sovereign. Because the old growth giant oaks necessary for the two new ships had to be gathered from forest remnants across England, construction was not begun until just after young Henry VIII, then just 20 years old, assumed the throne.

The ambitious young monarch with big plans evidently took a personal interest in the construction.  He also probably selected her name, either for his favorite sister Mary and the Tudor Rose or for the Virgin Mary as symbolized by a rose.  Perhaps the name even had a double meaning.

Her keel was laid in Portsmouth in 1510 and she was launched in July 1511 and then towed to London and fitted with rigging and decking and supplied with armaments.  No known plans or pictures from life are known from this period and there is some controversy as to her exact conformation, but she drew about 500 tons.  The shape of the hull was a tumblehome formand reflected the use of the ship as a platform for heavy guns. Above the waterline, the hull gradually narrowed to compensate for the weight of the gunsand to make boarding more difficult. 

The open deck between the fore and aft castles was meant to accommodate not only artillery, but scores of yeomen longbowmen who could rain death into the rigging and onto the decks of opposing warships.  There would also need to be room for compliments of heavy bruisers capable of wielding cutlasses in boarding parties.   These troops—and additional soldiers if she was on an invasion or raiding missionusually outnumbered the sailing crew and gunners. 

When Mary Rose set sail on her first combat cruise in 1512 she carried 206 sailors; 120 gunners; 22 sailing officers, surgeons, pursers, quartermasters, and the like; and 411 soldiers of all types.  That was a mighty crowded ship.

That year Henry VIII had made an alliance with the Spanish against the French after his marriage to Catherine of Aragon for the War of the League of Cambrai.  Her first action was as Admiral Sir Edward Howard’s flagship in action against a combined French and Breton fleet in the English Channel.  In action in support of a landing of Spanish troops further south, Howard’s fleet captured 12 Breton ships and conducted landings and raids along the Breton coast.  Her first action was a victory.

Later that year she got to use her heavy guns against a superior fleet for the first time at the Battle of Saint-Mathieu off the coast of Brest.  Mary Rose reportedly led the charge into a large French/Breton fleet which was disorganized.  In a confused melee fight the English got the upper hand.  The battle is best remembered because the Breton flagship Cordelière and was boarded by the Regent, a newer English ship drawing 1,000 tons.  In the confusing fight the powder magazineof the Cordelière blew up setting fire to the Regent and sinking her.  Only about 180 and of the English ship’s crew and a handful of Bretons survived.  The High Admiral of France and the Steward of the town of Morlaixwere among the hundreds killed.  Admiral Howard burned 27 French ships, captured another five and landed forces near Brest to raid and take prisoners.   More damage might have been done but Channel storms caused the English fleet to return to England for repairs.

The war dragged on another two years.  In 1512 Admiral Howard was killed after leading a boarding party against a pesky galley and the fleet returned to England in disarray.  By 1514 the war ended with a new peacebetween the old rivals and the marriageof Henry’s sister Mary to French King Louis XII.

With the outbreak of peace Mary Rose and most other English war ships were laid up in ordinary—docked with a skeleton crew of a dozen or so and minimally maintained until 1522 with one short exception—she and other reserve ships were called into service and decorated lavishly to escort Henry to France for his meeting with new French King Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in June 1520. Their menacing magnificence was meant as a warning to the French king.

Peace could never last too long between the old rivals.  In 1522 Henry allied himself with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the Papal States for a war on the Mediterranean power Venice and France.  England planned an invasion of France while French armies, the Austrians and Papal states slugged it out inItaly.  Mary Rose escorted an invasion fleet which captured the Breton port of Morlaix.  She returned to England without serious naval combat.  Most of the rest of the war was conducted on land in France, with the English managing to briefly threaten Paris.  The Scots joined the war on the French side and Mary Rose spent most of the rest of the war patrolling the Channel to deter French counter-raids and harass the Scots.

Meanwhile the French were defeated in Italy at the Battle of Pavia where Francis was captured by armies personally led by Charles V.  in 1525.  That ended Charles’s interest in the war and Henry was forced to withdraw empty handed from France.

Mary Rose returned to ordinary and kept in reserve until 1545.  It was during this period that she was “made new” along with most of the other capital ships of the small Navy under the stewardship of the King’s favorite at the time, Thomas Cromwell.  Despite the enlargement and reconstruction, she returned to ordinary for another nine years after work was completed.

Henry VIII complex marriage arrangements had made the former pious Defender of the Faith abandon Catholicism and awkwardly back into Protestantism.  His divorce from Catherine of Aragon who could not produce a male heir precipitated the change.  It also cut him off from his former alliance with Spain.  His very profitable—for him—seizure of the monasteries earned the further wrath of another former ally, thePope.  Henry and England were diplomatically marginalized and the likely target for a Catholic crusade led by mighty France.

Once again Henry accepted an alliance with Charles V and agreed to cooperate on invasions of France from opposite directions.  Mary Rose was called to escort the invasion force that managed to capture Boulogne at great cost in September 1544.  But Charles made a separate peace with France and left his ally high, dry, and dangerously exposed.  The French were now able to concentrate their power against the English.

In July a huge force under the command of Admiral Claude d’Annebault set sail for England from Havre de Grâce with 128 ships including a large number of nimble Mediterranean galleys and an army of 30,000 or so.  The English could muster only 80 ships, most of them hastily converted merchantmen and about 18,000 troops.  After a brief attempt at a counter raid the English retreated to Portsmouth.  The French advanced into the Solent, the strait that separates the Isle of Wight from the mainland. They landed troops on the Isle and advanced on Portsmouth where the English capital ships were becalmed and unable to maneuver.

Henry VIII dined on board Great Harry, the flagship of Admiral John Dudleyon the evening of July 18 and then retired to land to watch the battle unfold.  The French attacked with their galleys aiming to swarm and destroy the helpless warships.  The English had only a dozen galleys of their own, which they sent out on a virtual suicide mission to stop the attack.  Then, almost miraculously, the wind suddenly rose.  Led by the venerable Mary Rose, flagship of Vice Admiral George Carew, the English charged the attacking galleys scattering them.  They were driving to the French capital ships in the Solent when Mary Rose in the van suddenly foundered and sank taking over 400 of her crew and soldiers to their deaths.

The French thought that their galleys had managed to get close enough to sink her, but there is no evidence of that.  No one knows exactly how she came to suddenly disastrously take water.  The leading theory is that the inexperienced gun crews—there were hardly any other kind after all of the years of peace— left the lowest tier of gun ports open after a salvo allowing them to be swamped with water as she heeled over in a mild wind to make a turn. Henry watched unbelieving from shore.

Despite the loss, the English charge disrupted and scattered the French fleet.  Meanwhile multiple landings on the Isle of Wight were repulsed in bitter fighting.  They took especially heavy casualties in an assault on the newly built fortress at Bonchurch which was defended by local militia.

His invasion in disarray and his own flagship leaking heavily and in danger of sinking out from under him, Admiral d’Annebault abandoned his attack and sailed back to France.  England had almost miraculously been saved.

The mysterious fate of the gallant Mary Rose quickly became the stuff oflegend and of ballads. 

Her loss and the close call encouraged Henry VIII to modernize his navy.  While still in the King’s Service the fleet was reorganized into the Navy Royal and expanded to 58 vessels by the time of Henry’s death in 1547.  His immediate successors, the boy king Edward VI and Queen Mary let the fleet deteriorate again to a mere coastal defense force.  Elizabeth I is usually credited with the determination to make England a world dominate naval power, but she had to rely on privateers and pirates like John Hawkins and Francis Drake to beat back the next great invasion threat—the Spanish Armada.  It was not until Restoration of Charles II in 1660 that the modern Royal Navy was officially created.

As for Mary Rose, she lay unmolested below the Solent for centuries until her wreckage was discovered in 1971 after years of searching by teams led by historian, journalist, and amateur diver Alexander McKeeand a group led by Lieutenant-Commander Alan Bax of the Royal Navy, sponsoredby the Committee for Nautical Archaeology in London.  The two teams had originally been fierce rivals with different theories of how she was lost and where exactly she might lay, but eventually combined efforts. She was found buried in silt 1.9 miles south of the entrance to Portsmouth harbor at a depth of just 36 feet at low tide.

The location had to be kept a secret because under British law at the time she could be freely plundered by looters and treasure hunters.  As a thin legal fiction, the discovery teams leased the seabed from Portsmouth harbor to afford questionable protection.  In 1973 Parliament finally passed the Protection of Wrecks Act that the Mary Rose was declared to be of national historic interest and enjoyed full legal protection from any disturbance by commercial salvage teams.  Even then there were years of lingering litigation and “personal items” retrieved from the wreck like chests, clothing remnants,cooking utensils, and some tools were claimed as fair game by salvagers and were in danger of being seized and auctioned off if raised from the wreck. 

It took years for a Mary Rose Committee with representativesfrom the National Maritime Museum, the Royal Navy, the BBC, and local Portsmouth organizations to raise money, mostly from private donors, to begin serious attempts to save and raise the ship.  The Committee became a registered charity in 1974, the same year it got official Royal patronage from Prince Charles, who made dives to the site. 

By 1978 initial excavation was complete revealing a remarkably intact hull.  Now that the hull was exposed, preservationists had to act quickly before biological decay and the scouring of the currentsdestroyed the wreckage. 

The cost of raising her would be enormous so a new organization, The Mary Rose Trust was created to raise funds and oversee the operations.  In 1979 the salvage vessel Sleipner was purchased for the operation and diving grew to 50 man teams working nine months a year with scores of additional volunteer divers.  From 1979 to 1982 over 22,000 diving hours were spent on the site, amounting to 11.8 man-years.

On the morning of October 11, 1982 just before foul weather would delay the project another year and after years of technological challenges,fits and starts, and sometimes dissention on the team, the operation to raise the wreck finally began.  A special frame that had been built to encase and stabilize the wreck was slowly jacked up on four legs straddling the wreck site to pull her off the seabed. The massive crane of the barge Tog Mor was lifted the frame and hull on to the specially designed cradle which was padded with water-filled bags.  Then with Prince Charles, BBC crew, and scores of excited witnesses the final lift began with the wreck breaking water at 9:02.  Despite one leg of the frame buckling and a corner of the frame slipping nearly 3 feet, the hull was lifted successfully out with minimal damage. 

The hull was brought to the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard by where Admiral Horatio Nelson’s flagship Victory was preserved.  Decades of meticulous preservation work was completed in carefully climate controlled environments, much of the time with the wreck and work observable to the public behind glass.  Special care also had to be taken with hundreds of artifacts from the wreck which went on display in the nearby Mary Rose Museum. 

The new Mary Rose Museum was designed by architects Wilkinson Eyre, Perkins+Wil and carefully built over and around not only the wreck but the historic dry dock at a cost of £35 million.  It opened to the public on May 31, 2013.  More than 50 million visitors have already toured the facility and in 2017 year it was voted the most popular tourist attraction inEurope.

Preservation of the hull is finally nearly complete.  It is slowly being dried under careful conditions.  But right now visitors can see the resurrected Mary Rose.

They said a couple of years ago Monarch butterflies are making a comeback of sorts.  My nature loving Facebook friends, who notice such things, commented from several locations and posted photos.  But before the celebration for the gets out of hand, ecologists, who should know, expressed concerns about long-range climate change, habitat destruction and the particularly egregious bulldozing of the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, a critical preserve, to make way for the Former Resident’s beloved border wall.  This year severe drought conditions in Mexico, Texas, and other areas along the Monarch’s long migratory path including northern Illinois has stunted and delayed the growth of milkweed, their only food source.

In 2015 Lisa Haderlein, a McHenry County maven of the environment and preserver and restorer of the wild places posted a photo on Facebook.  It was taken outside the Starline Gallery in Harvard.  It got me to thinking….

The Lovely Corpse

Monarchs, they say, are a dying breed.

Not the superfluous Royals of Windsor

            or oil rich Arabs.

They will disappear, too,

in their own good time

but are not our business here today.

I am talking about those golden orange and black

            zephyr riding marvels that by the millions

            used brighten Septembers

            with hints golden autumn yet to come

            on their epic migrations

            from Canadian prairies

            to Mexican piney woods.

They are scarcer with every passing year.

Now each sighting is an adventure

            like spotting some rare songbird

            flitting unexpectedly from bough to bough.

They say the warming world is to blame

            which is tough on common milkweed,

            the migrant’s only diet.

Perhaps.

But if I say it aloud,

some Fox News talking head

will scream that I’m a liar and a fraud

and someone will decide that after all

they are illegal immigrants

and likely terrorists to boot

and propose to build a wall net

to ensnare them lest they

infect our purity.

A friend of mine espied one the other day

            and thought to snap a photo,

            but the monarch was not on wing

            or resting on some rare milkweed pod,

            but splatted against the gleaming grill

            of a Jaguar.

Think of all that horsepower

            from the carbon spewing engine

            that cooks the atmosphere

            that kills the milkweed

            yet made this assassination

            personal.

—Patrick Murfin 

Note—The fight for immigration justice and against detention began well before the Coalition to Cancel the ICE Contract in McHenry County swung into action last year in the midst of the global Coronavirus pandemic.  The Latino Coalition, McHenry County League of Latin American Citizens (LULLAC), and the old Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Woodstock organized the first march from the Square to the County complex back in 2007.  Since then, there were many marches and vigils, large and small.  Immigration was a key issue at the hugely successful Hate Has No Home Here march around Woodstock Square and rally in March 2017.  But the largest rally at the Jail, Lights for Liberty Woodstock, was held two years ago on July 12, 2019.  This is an account of that event that I posted on the Blog the next day.

In more than 50 years as an activist it was the first time I remember a crowd gathering to the sounds of a sousaphone ensemble.  Sousaphones Against Hate lent a joyous Wisconsin brat and beer vibe to the steady stream of folks carrying signs and folding chairs who were filling the grassy strip along Route 47 to participate in Lights for Liberty Woodstock, the rally and vigil at the McHenry County Jail/Immigrant Detention facility.  It was one of more than 500 such events across the country in addition to a number of other anti-ICE marches and protests in cities great and small—an eruption of Resistance to the terrorizing and oppression of immigrants and asylum seekers.

Organizers and volunteers had been working overtime for weeks to make the event a reality.  We coordinated our efforts through conference calls facilitated by Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth and Scott Cross of Indivisible Illinois—an indispensable asset and major co-sponsorof the event.  Volunteers, many of whom had never met or worked together before, came from all over the Chicago area joining local lead organizers Patrick Murfin, hereafter known as the Old Man of the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation Social Justice Team, and Elisabeth Hubbard of Lake County.

Together we shared tasks and responsibilities, lined up 11 other co-sponsoring organizations, recruited speakers, attended to innumerable logistic and support details, and finally assembled, with some last minute juggling a coherent and effective program that would discuss the many aspects of the current crisis.  Elisabeth Hubble acted as our registration person for speakers, stage manager, and general major domo who kept the program running smoothly.  The Old Man was joined on stage by immigration attorney Lillian Gonzalezas co-hosts.

Earlier in the afternoon after some semi-comic glitches we managed to drag a rented 4 X 8 foot stage section and a battery powered p.a. podium half a block and set them up near the chain link fence that blocked off half of the jail parking lot which was under re-construction.  We met with friendly but firm Sheriff Department officers, who told us that unlike previous similar rallies in the same location, we could not set foot on any of the parking lots surrounding the Jail, Court House, and County government complex. 

Our experienced and efficient event marshals under the leadership of Dee Darling—veterans of several marches and events on Woodstock Square—helped folks safely cross Rt. 47 from parking at the schoolacross the street.  As we made last minute arrangements around the stage—the p.a. system on the podium emitted screechingfeedback and we were rescued by Scott Cross’s small portable unit with a hand-held microphone—and as the sousaphones played the swelling crowd spread out along Rt. 47 holding up hand-made signs to the busy street traffic passing by.  Many cars honked their support.

Promptly at 7pm we began the rally program.  The crowd turned to face the stage and was continually reinforced through the evening.  At its peak the press and several experienced crowd estimators figured that 400-500 were in attendance.

After a welcome and some brief house-keeping announcements the program began with Marilee Gordon, the retired Rabbi Emeritus of the McHenry County Jewish Congregation,a leading member of the interfaith group Faithbridge, and a jail visitor for the Interfaith Community for Detained Immigrants (ICDI).  She grounded her remarks in the requirements to welcome and harbor immigrants and strangers found in the Torah and Talmudic teachings as well as in the Christian New Testament, and Islamic scripture.

She was followed on the stage by Melanie Schikore, Executive Director of ICDI who put a personal face on people detained in the McHenry County Jail and other detention center and ended with the admonition that we all must work to free those who are held, often in terrible conditions in the border camps, demand that the government’s punitive immigration policies be reversed, and demand that ICE, the stormtroopers for enforcing that policy, be abolished.  She was the first of many speakers to reference the nation-wide family raids that have been touted the administration and which striking terror in many communities.

Dave Trost representing McHenry County Progressives read a moving message from a detainee at a one of the Illinois detention centers.  Sara Crosental, a young woman from Rising DREAMERS Uniterecounted her personal story of being awakened by armed, unidentified men in black crashing into her family home to drag her father away.

Carol Huntsinger, a Lake County church musician led the crown in the first song of the evening, the Civil Rights anthem We Shall Overcome.  Later veteran singer/guitarist Norm Siegel, who the Old Man has known since the days of the Earl of Old Town and the great Chicago folk music scare fifty years ago led a rousing rendition of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Landand began the candlelight vigil with the familiar spiritual This Little Light of Mine.

Dr. Marjoie Fujara, a child abuse pediatrics specialist for the Cook County Department of Health,explained the impact of child maltreatment and toxic stress on unaccompanied minors seeking refugee status.

Lea Grover of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) discussed the sexual abuse and violence that many women and children endure not only in detention custody, but by employers, husbands, mates, and others who know that the victims will be unlikely to report crimes for fear of being exposed to arrest and deportation.

At this point the Old Man needs to explain his near constant presence on stage.  Contrary to rumor, I was not just trying to hog the camera.  I had real trouble getting on and off of the 16 inch high stage platform, especially as the night wore on.

Co-host Lillian Gonzalez spoke as a former undocumented alien who became a lawyer representing clients enmeshed in the system.

Lisa Arvanites of McHenry County NOW spoke on the special dangers that members of the LGBTQ face especially trans women of color who endure a triple whammy of discrimination and marginalization face.

Kristina Zahorik, the Chair of the Democratic Party of McHenry County and of the Illinois Democratic County Chairs Committee, told of her personal political re-awakening after the disastrous 2006 election that brought Donald Trump to power along with enlarged majorities in the House and Senate and control of most state governments.  She was given hope by the groundswell of activism that returned the House to a Democratic majority including new Representatives Lauren Underwood and Sean Casten, brought J. B. Pritzker to the Governorship, and elected 5 Democrats to the county Board.

Scott Cross, Executive Director of Indivisible Illinois spoke to actions folks can take moving forward including keeping regular contact with state and Federal legislatorsand office holders to demand action on immigration and other critical issues; being ready to take to the streets in more actions, rally, and marches including civil disobedience; actively working on upcoming campaigns, and most importantly joining or starting grassroots organizations working to effect change.

As the final speaker of the evening finished volunteers distributed vigil candles to those who didn’t bring their own which were lit as the gloaming settled in over the Jail.  After a period of song and silent witness a car caravan from Aurora organized by Stand and March and Uni2 arrived.  They processed though the hushed crowd carrying seven white wooden crossesrepresenting the five children known to have died this year in custody, and Oscar Alberto Martinez his 23-month-old daughter Angie Valeria who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande to seek asylum.   They placed the crosses in a row by the stage and knelt behind the crosses.  No vestige of whispering or rustle of a distracted crowd lingered.  After several minutes of silence Casotio “Casey” Cuevas spoke emotionally on behalf of the members of the caravan.

When the vigil wound down, volunteers quickly took down the stage and carted it, table, chairs, bottled water and other items to vehicles.  One of the last volunteers on the grounds was the tireless Missy Funk of McHenry County Progressives and Woodstock Pride looked up and saw lights flashing in the slit windows of the Jail’s fourth floor where immigrant detainees are held.  They were aware of the vigil and that folks on the outside had not forgotten them.  They were flashing, probably at risk of punishment, a thank-you.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge all of the organization who co-sponsored the rally and vigil—the Democratic Party of McHenry County, Illinois Muslim Civic Coalition, Indivisible Illinois, Indivisible Brookfield, ICDI, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), McHenry County Democratic Women’s Club, McHenry County National Organization for Women (NOW), McHenry County Progressives, Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), Sousaphones Against Hate, Woodstock Pride, Women’s March, None of the Above, and the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation Social Justice Team.

In the eyes of anti-war folks opposition to the Draft is a matter of principle.  I fully understand.  After all, I was a Vietnam resistor and did my time in Federal custody.  The active draft was allowed to expire un-mourned though a rusty Selective Service System remains in place if needed.  Our recent wars of choice—the Gulf War, intervention in Bosnia, and the tandem wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—have been fought by an all-volunteer professional military and a National Guard/Reserve component stretched to the limits.  As always, the dead young soldiers are mostly from the poorand working classes.  The sonsand daughters of the economic and political elite are notableby their almost complete absence.  Yet few, if any, voices have been raised for a return to the Draft. 

The nation’s first Draft, enacted in the midst of a bloody Civil War did not get off to a good start and its opponents hardly covered themselves in progressive glory.  On July 13, 1863 the New York Draft Riots broke out.  Historians describe it as the largest and bloodiest revolt against government authority in American history—except for the bloodier conflict that sparked it. 

In the third year of carnage, the Union desperately needed fresh bodies.  The enthusiastic responses that had filled the ranks of Volunteer units in the early days of the war had faded with the mounting casualty count.  After the first batches of 90 day volunteerscame and went, subsequent volunteers units found themselves serving “for the duration.”  As mounting casualties thinned their ranks with no good system of recruiting replacements, regiments shrank to the size of companies, brigades to regiments, divisions to brigades.  Raising new volunteer units at home became harder and harder. 

President Abraham Lincoln, knowing how unpopular it would be, reluctantly backed the Draft in the hope that the threatwould spur a new round of volunteer enlistments.  It turned out it did, but that’s another story.  Democrats were ideologically opposed to the extension of government power and many were either tepid supporters of the war or in sympathy with the South.  Even many Republicans were queasy. 

But the Draft, though unpopular, might have been tolerated if it were not for one glaring provision.  Drafted men could escape service if they provided—hired—a substitute or paid the Treasury a $300 commutation fee.  This provision was intended to produce an infusion of cash in support of the war effort which was seen as just as important as securing bodies.  Naturally members of the lower classes resented this, recognizing that rich men’s sons could buy their way out of harm’s waywhile they were doomed to be cannon fodder. 

Many of New York’s laboring classes had another reason toresent conscription.  The war effort had stimulated the economy.  Factoriesand ship yards were humming with war production.  Unemployment, long the bane of the slums, was disappearing and wages were high.  To a lot of working men it looked like just when they were finally going to get a piece of the pie, they were going to be snatched away to become $8 a month privates. 

Democrats incontrol of the city had been allied with Southern Democrats since Aaron Burr and the earliest days of Tammany Hall.  They competed against Whig/Free Soil/Republican organizationsfrom Up State for control of the state government.  In 1862 with state Republican boss William H. Seward away serving in Lincoln’s Cabinet, New York Democrats were able to elect anti-war Horatio Seymour as Governor, who the Lincoln administration viewed as a Copperhead and a virtual fifth columnist.

Tammany Hall Machine rallied opposition to the Draft, although they were careful not to call for resistance.  Instead they proposed to pay the fees of members who were drafted.  But they indirectly contributed to opposition with their successful campaign to enroll as many immigrants as possible as citizensso that they could vote.  These new citizens, largely but not exclusively Irish, found themselves suddenly subject to the Draft.  

The first Draft drawing occurred on Saturday, July 11 without incident.  But when the list of drafted men was published in Monday’s newspapers it overwhelmingly contained the names of laborers and mechanics.  It looked like the “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight” that opponents had warned of.

The second drawing was slated to take place on Monday, July 13 at 10 am at the Ninth District Provost Marshal’s Office, Third Avenue and 47th Street.  A crowd of over 500 gathered outside led by firemen of Black Joke Engine Company 33, some of whose members had been called.  After pelting the building with paving stones, they rushed inside beating and dispersing officials then setting the building ablaze. 

The undermanned Police Department respondedbut was unable tocontain the crowd.  Superintendent James Kennedy was recognized, although in civilian clothes, and was seized by the crowd which nearly beat him to death.  The police responded with a disorganized charge with clubs and revolvers but were overwhelmed by the growing mob which began to roam the streets seeking new targets for its wrath.  The local armories of the New York Militia were empty because their troops had been sent to Pennsylvania to stem the tide of Robert E. Lee’s invasion.  The Police, for the time being, were on their own.

The famous Bulls Head Hotel on 44th Street was torched when it refused toserve rioters liquor.  The home of Republican Mayor George Opdyke on Fifth Avenue, the Eighth and Fifth District police stations, and other buildings were attacked and set on fire.  The staff of Horace Greeley’s Republican newspaper, The Tribune barely managed to save their building by manning two Gatling Gunsthat they had somehow procured. 

The mood of the crowd really turned ugly when they encountered a Black man on Clarkson Street. He was beaten, hanged from a tree and set afire by the cheering mob.  Blacks of all ages and both sexes were attacked when found, their homes burned by laborers resentful of competition with them for jobs and blaming them for causing the War.  The Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue was set ablaze although hard-pressed police reportedly were able to evacuate the nearly 400 orphans and the staff.  In all at least 26 Blacks were killed, although many historians regard that figure as ridiculously low. 

As night fell the police finally established a line preventing the rioting from spreading south of Union Square.  Then heavy rains helped douse the fires and send everyone home. 

The crowd swelled again on Tuesday as many workers not involved on the first day downed their tools and joined, paralyzing businessand commerce.  The homes of several prominent Republicans were sacked and burned.  Governor Seymour arrived from Albany and addressed the crowd at City Hall declaring that conscription wasunconstitutional.  Seymour’s defenders have said that his motivation was simply to diffuse the situation.  In Washington Lincoln and the War Department considered it pandering to the mob at best or inciting an insurrection—and possibly a widerCopperhead rebellion.  They scrambledto mobilize troops from Pennsylvania to march to the relief of the city.  Meanwhile Major General John Wool, an agingMexican War veteran in command of the New York District cobbled together a force of 800 troops from the harbor forts and West Point and ordered the New York Militia home from the front. 

The announcement in the newspapers on Wednesday by the Provost Marshallthat the draft would be suspended in the city caused some rioters to stay home.  Others returned to the streets and the rampage. 

Militia and Volunteer units who reached the city, often exhausted by forced marches and irate at violence at home while they were facing the enemy—many of them having just seen hard action at Gettysburg—reacted harshly and without restraint.  They unleashedvolleys of fire into mobs, charged with bayonets, and even cleared public squares with artillery fire, some of it incoming from Navy ships in the harbor. Among the troops arriving from the battlefield were members of 11th New York Volunteers (who had begun the war as Ellsworth’s Zouaves recruited from the same fire battalions now leading the rioters), the 152nd New York Volunteers, the 26th Michigan Volunteers, the 30th Indiana Volunteers and the 7th Regiment New York State Militia.  Governor Seymour under pressure from Washington also dispatched Upstate Militia units that had not yet been Federalized.

Many of the troops from the City were Irish, as were substantial numbers of the rioters.  Even in the face of such overwhelming force, fighting was sometimes heavy. Colonel Henry F. O’Brien, commanding the 11th was seized by the mob and beaten to death. 

By Thursday there were several thousand troops in the city.  That evening a final confrontation near Gramercy Park was quelled with artillery fire resulting in scores of deaths.  After that an uneasy peace prevailed in the city. 

The exact toll of deaths and injuries in four days of rioting is a matter of wide debate.  Respected Civil War historian James M. McPherson places the total civilian deaths at a relatively light 120 while Herbert Asbury, a specialist in New York history and experton the 19th Century gangs who played a leading role in the fighting, places the figure much higher with as many 2,000 killed and 8,000 injured. 

Samuel Eliot Morison, author of one of the most respected single volume histories of the United States ever written and a Boston Yankee with unabashed Union sympathies regarded the riots as, “equivalent to a Confederate victory.” 

Lincoln and the War Department considered it a very close thing, but in the end a victory.  Not only was the Draft resumed without further interference, but widespread public revulsion in the North doomed Copperhead hopes in Ohio and border regions. 

Property losses were estimated to be between $1 and 5 million.  Most of that loss was uncompensated by insuranceor the government.  At least 50 buildings burned, including two Protestant churches with noted Abolitionist ministers. 

The Draft Riots are often paintedas an exclusively Irish uprising.  While the Irish certainly made up large portions of the mobs, they were never even in the majority.  Plenty of lower class “Americans,” including members native Yankees of the Fire Brigades that played such a prominent role on the first two days, were involved as were other immigrant nationalities—except for the stalwart Unionist Germans.  And, as we have seen, Irish in the police and military played key roles in finally quashing the rebellion. 

You think politics today is a vicious contact sport?  Sissy stuff.  On July 11, 1804 the sitting Vice President of the United States plugged a Founding Father in the gut leaving him to die in agony a day later.  It was the most famous Affair of Honor in American History—the fatal meeting between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton on the dueling grounds at Weehawken, New Jersey, a bluff overlooking the Hudson River and the City of New York beyond. 

The men, so alike in temperament and ambition, were long-time bitter political rivals. 

Hamilton, of course, was George Washington favorite, the virtual son he never had.  After distinguished service as Washington’s aide-de-camp in the Revolution, he became the principal author of the Federalist Papers.  As Secretary of the Treasury, he famouslypaid off American war debt and establishedthe First Bank of the United States.  Thomas Jefferson’s bitter personal and political rival, Hamilton founded and was the chief architect and organizerof the Federalist Party.  In New York he was a successful lawyer and businessman who married into the wealthy and powerful Patroon dynasty, the Schuylers.

Yet despite his wealth, success, and fame, he was humiliated by the humble circumstances of his birth as the bastard child of a Scottishclerk on the island colony of Barbados.  He would be haunted by rumors that his mother was a mulato creole.  He knew that he was not by rights a gentleman and his foreign birth forever precludedhim from becoming truly Washington’s heir as President.

Burr was born in more privileged circumstances, the sonand namesake of a leading Presbyterian divine and the second president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton.)  He served with distinction in the Revolution displaying battlefield bravery and shrewd tactical acumen many times.  He achieved the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, but despite his notable achievementswas not elevated to higher rank by Washington—a cause of personal bitterness.  After the war Burr married the daughter of a British officer and moved to New York where he became the leading criminal defense attorney in the city.  After a turn in the State Assembly, Burr’s political fortunes rose under the sponsorship of Governor George Clinton, the leading northern ally of Jefferson in his emerging Democratic Republican Party.  Clinton appointed young Burr state Attorney General and backed him in 1791 when Burr beat incumbent Phillip Schuyler—Hamilton’sfather-in-law—to take a U.S. Senate seat. 

Although their previous personal relationswere cordial much of their mutual enmity grew from this confrontation.  In the end Burr grew restless in a Senate dominated by Federalists and prolonged absences hurt his income as an attorney on which he was dependent since he was not personally wealthy.  He resigned his seat to return to the state Assembly.  Officially an independent with Republican leanings, Burr also drew support from moderate Federalists who became alarmed at Hamilton’s attacks on President John Adams.  In the city Burr assembled his own political organization, considered by many one of the first political machines.  He enlisted the support of a local patriotic society, The Sons of St. Tammany, in addition to Jefferson loyalists. 

In the election of 1800, New York and its rich electoral vote was considered pivotal.  Burr was named running mate to Jefferson on the Democratic Republican ticket in the hope that he could deliver New York, although the Assembly was in Federalist hands before the election.  Federalists in the city under Hamilton were in disarray, divided by his tepid support of the President.  A private letter by Hamilton highly critical of Adams’ character was published causing considerable damage and Burr was suspected—but never proven—to be behind the dirty trick.  Meanwhile his new machine paid off handsomely.  Republicans swept the city taking with it the Assembly which in turn selected Republican electors. 

Under the Constitution at the time the candidate with a majority of electors won the presidency and the second place finisher became vice president.  This system was in place before thedevelopment of parties.  There was no provision fortickets or a designated vice presidential candidate.  There was a planfor one elector to withhold a vote to Burr, but mysteriously none did so, resulting in a 73-73 tie vote between Jefferson and Burr.  The decision was thrown into the House of Representatives where Federalists held a substantial edge. 

The House soon deadlocked.  Despite public and private statements deferring to Jefferson, ever ambitious, Burr privately courted friends of John Adams among the Federalists to block Jefferson.  Hamilton sprang into action himself, unleashing a flurry of letters urging the election of Jefferson who he considered the “far less dangerous of the two.”  However, much he detested Jefferson, he despised Burr more.  On the 36th ballot Hamilton convinced two of his supporters to abstain.  Recognizing defeat, Burr’s moderate Federalist support fell in line behind Jefferson.  Needless to say, after the intrigue relations between the new President and Vice President were icy. 

Against this festering background, things came to a head in 1804 as it became apparent that Jefferson would dump Burr as Vice President.  He turned his eyes to a comeback in Albany as Governor. These plans were squashed when Hamilton threw his support behind another Republican, Morgan Lewis.  During the campaign an ardent supporter of Hamilton sent a letter to his father-in-law Philip Schuyler excoriating Burr and alluding to “a still more despicable opinion which General Hamilton has expressed of Mr. Burr.”  The letter indiscreetly found publication in the Albany Register.  Burr whipped off a letter demanding of Hamilton an “explanation and apology.”  Hamilton professed ignorance of any such statement and refused to apologize. 

After subsequent exchanges through intermediaries, Burr formally challengedHamilton.  At many points in this exchange either party could have diffused the situation over a slight which many historians believe did not rise to the occasion of an affair of honor even among the prickly.  But they did not.  Hamilton may have been suffering depression over the downturn of his political fortunes—the defeat of Adams had destroyed the Federalists as a national party leaving behind only a sectional rump in New England.  He had also been humiliated by a sexual blackmail scandal which had caused him to issue a public letter admitting to indiscretions.  And he was also deeply in debt.  Most of all, he mourned the loss of his son Philipwho had been killed on the Weehawken dueling ground in 1801 in a fight at least partly over his father’s honor. 

Plans were laid for the duel, which would be held in secret in New Jersey because dueling had been outlawed in New York Stateand because both men, despite participation in earlier duels, were publicly opposed to the practice.  In a document written to be found in event he was killed, Hamilton wrote that:

I have resolved, if our interview is conducted in the usual manner, and it pleases God to give me the opportunity, to reserve and throw away my first fire, and I have thoughts even of reserving my second fire. 

This was a common, honorable, practice which was usually, but not universally, honored in turn by the second party refusing to fire or “wasting his shot.”  In this manner most duels ended bloodlessly but honorably.  But Burr had no way of knowing that this was Hamilton’s intention. 

There was no eyewitnesses testimony to the shooting itself.  The seconds to both men and the hired oarsmen who had ferried them across the Hudson were positioned with their backs to the action so that if called to court they could truthfully testify that they did not “witness fire.”  The best reconstruction of the events goes as follows—although a minority historians debate virtually every single particular to this day. 

The men faced each other at a distance of less than twenty feet.  Hamilton faced east, across the riverwith the morning sun in his eyes.  There was a slight, rising mist.  Hamilton ostentatiously practiced aiming and sighting his pistol and polished his glasses for better vision, which would have indicted to Burr that he intended to shoot.  By lot, Hamilton had the first shot.  He raised his pistol and fired high into the air, the bullet lodging in a tree limb high aboveand to the left of Burr.  But this was not the common way to “waste a bullet” which was to fire into the ground. 

Burr may have concluded that he had simply come under incompetent fire.  At any rate, he leveled his matched pistol and fired, striking Hamilton in the stomach.  The bullet grazed his liver and diaphragm before becoming lodged in his spine, likely paralyzing him below the wound.  He crumpled to the ground immediately. 

Turning around witnesses describe Burr as looking shocked and starting toward Hamilton before his second rushed him away, hiding him behind an umbrella.  Hamilton told Dr. David Hosack, “The wound is fatal” before collapsing into unconsciousness.  The doctor soon lost trace of a pulse or sign of respiration.  Seconds hurriedly carried the wounded man to the boat, where he revived. 

Carried to the home of an acquaintanceHamilton lingered until the next day, much of the time awake but delirious with pain. 

Burr must have known that his political career was as dead as Hamilton.  Public outrage was great.  He was indicted for murder in both New Jersey and New York.  Burr fled the city to the South Carolina plantation of his beloved daughter Theodosia.  The murder charges in New Jersey were eventually dismissed. 

Burr returned to Washington to finish his term as Vice President, dutifully presiding over sessions of the Senate.  His final days were markedas the presiding officer in the impeachment of Federal Judge Samuel Chase with what a contemporary said was, “with the dignity and impartiality of an angel and the rigor of a devil.”  Soon after he summoned all of his considerable charm in an emotional farewell to the Senate that had even some of his old enemies in tears. 

Burr turned his attention to adventurous schemesin the West including a filibustering campaign toliberate Texas from the Spanish—or possibly to set himself up a ruler of an inland empire.  Unfortunately for Burr one of his fellow plotters was the Commanding General of the U.S. Army James Wilkinson, who was also a long-time secret agent of the Spanish (can’t make this kind of stuff up, folks.)  As authorities began to uncover the plot, Wilkinson saved himself in a letter to President Jefferson putting the whole thing in Burr’s lap.  

Jefferson was eager for revenge on Burr and had him prosecuted for treason.  The President was foiled at the 1807 trial presided over by Federalist Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall sitting as a circuit judge who directed a verdict ofacquittal on the grounds that no eyewitnessesto any overt acts could be found.

Fleeing notoriety and creditors Burr went to Europe where he tried to raise moneyfor further western adventures.  He lived for a while with noted British UnitarianJeremy Bentham.  He was eventually ordered out of England and Napoleon Bonaparte refused to entertain him to hear about his plot to seize Spanish Florida and/or British Caribbean islands. 

In 1812 Burr returnedto New York, where he was tried for murdering Hamilton but acquitted.  He resumed the practice of law and his charm ensured a wide circle offriends.  One feeble attempt at a political comeback failed.  His heart and health were broken when his beloved daughter Theodosia and his grandson perished in a shipwreck.  A long-time widower, he married a wealthy heiress late in life, but she walked out after only four months after discovering that Burr was siphoning her riches to support Western land investment schemes.  She was granted a divorce on the day he died.  September 14, 1836 at the age of 80 after a paralyzing stroke. 

The Burr-Hamilton Duel spurred opposition to dueling in the North.  Burr, with his reputation for shady dealings and political opportunism is generally cast as the villain of the story by historians.  But he had his supporters, including liberal novelist Gore Vidal, who made Burr the hero of one of the novels in his multi-volume American history arc. 

Following the duel Anti-dueling sentiment spread, laws against the practice were more scrupulously enforced and new ones were enacted where they had not previously been in force.  By 1830 most of the nation outlawed dueling, and it was rapidly disappearing in the North. It long remained common, however, among the Southern Planter classand in the military, two places in which honor depended on the acknowledgement of others and could be irretrievably lost if not defended.

More than 60,000 bodies crammed into Chicago’s Soldier Field, then the seating capacity of the stadium on the Lake 55 years ago on Sunday, July 10, 1966.  The Sun-Times reported the next day that thousands more were turned away.  Although mega-watt stars were on hand to perform including Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Peter Paul & Mary not a single ticketwas sold to see them.  The real star, you see, was the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and he had something important to saythat day—a challenge to the City of Chicago for specific and systematic change to make African-American citizens truly equal in a great Northern city.

The waves of change caused by that day continue to lap the shores of Lake Michigan.

In 1965 with a string of impressive victories for its relentless non-violent protest campaigns across the South and Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 under its belt, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began to cast its eye to the great northern cities where the Great Migration had established huge populations of the Black Diaspora to see if the tactics of non-violence and civil disobedience could successfully be appliedoutside of Dixie.  No American city was a more important destination and home for Blacks than Chicago—and none so completely segregated in housingand by neighborhood.

The city already had active and well known groups employing non-violent protest to pressure City Hall for changes.  The Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) had its roots in protests to school policies under Superintendent of Public Instruction Benjamin Willis in the early ‘60s.  A campaign of sit-ins and two mass attendance boycotts were aimed at the de-facto segregation of the public schools.  Teacher Al Raby came to leadership of the loose organization that included sometimes quarrelsome elements including militantsof the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Chicago Area Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the more moderateChicago Catholic Interracial Counciland the Chicago Urban League.

The Quaker American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) was also active on the West Side, the poorest of Chicago’sghettos and often ignored even by older established Black groups based in older South Side communities.  But despite the White anguish, the Black community was becoming too large, too noisy, and, yes, too dangerous to be ignored. 

The SCLC’s Director of Direct Action James Bevel came north in ’65 to work with the West side project and was soon also in contact with Raby who wanted to launch a new campaign against housing discrimination.  With the blessing of Dr. King, the SCLC committed its resources to the new effort dubbed the Chicago Freedom Movement.  Bevel and a handful of other veteran SCLC activists moved to the city to launch the project.

The Chicago Freedom Movement declared its intention to end slums in the city. It organized tenants’ unions, assumed control of a slum tenement, founded action groups like Operation Breadbasket, and attempted to rally both Black and white citizens to support its goals.  The campaign created an uproar and attracted widespread publicity but was not moving Mayor Richard J. Daley and the establishment he represented to make any concessions.  Very reluctantly Raby agreed to let Bevel call in the big gun—Dr. King himself. 

For King this was anopportunity he had been looking for.  He had wanted for some time to turn his attention to economic issues and the systematic racism that constrained Black ambitions everywhere, not just in the South.  And he wanted to challenge the complacency of white liberals who gave lip service to the cause as long as it was not on their doorstep.

In January of ’66 King very publicly moved his family into a slum apartment on the West Side.  He announced his intention to stay in the city and launched a new round of marches and protests.  Just as Raby had feared, King became the face of the movement, an eight-hundred-pound-gorilla in the media that left little room for established local leaders. 

And as he must have expected, the city’s press, which had once painted him a hero for freedom in the South,now frothed in unison that he was a dangerous outside agitator disturbing racial harmony, provoking violence, and likely fronting for more shadowy radicals and Communists.

By spring it was apparent that vague or ad hoc demands were not enough.  At a series of participatory democracy meeting conducted by the CCCO, the Quakers on the West Side, and the new Operation Breadbasket, the project of rising star the Rev. Jesse Jackson, ideas were gathered, refined, and sent back for review and revision.  In the end a list of twelve demands was drawn up addressed to six power centers in the city.

The question then was how best to present the demands to most dramatically get the attention ofauthorities and to mobilize even greater participation in the direct action campaign—a rally, a march on City Hall, an address to an important civic organization like the Union League which represented the establishment, a press conference, even the launch of a hunger strike were all considered.

In the end leadership of the campaign settled on a unique stuntfollowed by the kind of mass rally of thousands where King’s legendary oratorical skills would rouse the Black community and White allies to action.

The big event required a scramble to organize.  Money, always a problem, needed to be raised, and this time donations from white liberal weredrying up.  There were tricky negotiations with the Park District, which was under the firm control of Daley loyalists, for use of Soldier Field.  Neighborhoods across the city had to be organized and transportation for tens of thousands to the rally site arranged.  The press had to be alerted and as much as possible massaged.

When he arrived at the stadium for the mass rally, King entered in an open convertible which drove around the cinder outer track before the bowl of cheering supporters.  In his speech, King laid out the reason for the demands and campaign.

We are here today because we are tired. We are tired of being seared in the flames of withering injustice. We are tired of paying more for less. We are tired of living in rat-infested slums and in the Chicago Housing Authority’s cement reservations. We are tired of having to pay a median rent of $97 a month in Lawndale for 4 rooms while whites in South Deering pay $73 a month for 5 rooms.

We are tired of inferior, segregated, and overcrowded schools which are incapable of preparing our young people for leadership and security in this technological age. We are tired of discrimination in employment which makes us the last hired and the first fired. We are tired of being by-passed for promotions while supervisory jobs are granted to persons with less training, ability, and experience simply because they are white. We are tired of the fact that the average white high school drop-out in Chicago earns more money than the average Negro college graduate.

We are tired of a welfare system which dehumanizes us and dispenses payments under procedures that are often ugly and paternalistic. Yes, we are tired of being lynched physically in Mississippi, and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and economically in the North.

We have also come here today to remind Chicago of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to end the long and desolate Night of Slumism. Now is the time to have a confrontation in the city of Chicago between the forces resisting change and the forces demanding change. Now is the time to let justice roll down from city hall like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream….

And, in the face of increased criticism of his strict commitment to non-violence by growing numbers of militant Black Power advocates, King reiterated his commitment:

I understand our legitimate discontent. I understand our nagging frustrations. We are the victims of a crisis of disappointment. But I must reaffirm that I do not see the answer to our problems in violence. Our movement's adherence to nonviolence has been a major factor in the creation of a moral climate that has made progress possible. This climate may well be dissipated not only by acts of violence but by the threats of it verbalized by those who equate it with militancy. Our power does not reside in Molotov cocktails, rifles, knives and bricks. The ultimate weakness of a riot is that it can be halted by superior force. We have neither the techniques, the numbers nor the weapons to win a violent campaign.

Many of our opponents would be happy for us to turn to acts of violence in order to have an excuse to slaughter hundreds of innocent people. Beyond this, violence never appeals to the conscience. It intensifies the fears of the white majority while relieving their guilt.

No, our power is not in violence. Our power is in our unity, the force of our souls, and the determination of our bodies. This is a force that no army can overcome, for there is nothing more powerful in all the world than the surge of unarmed truth…

…Nonviolence does not mean doing nothing. It does not mean passively accepting evil. It means standing up so strongly with your body and soul that you cannot stoop to the low places of violence and hatred. I am still convinced that nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon, it cuts without wounding. It is a sword that heals, here in Chicago we must pick up the weapon of truth, the ammunition of courage, we must put on the breastplate of righteousness and the whole armor of God. And with this, we will have a non-violent army that no violent force can halt and no political machine can resist.

Later in the meeting Floyd McKissick, President of CORE, a proponent of Black Power, and sometimes a harsh critic of King, stepped to the microphone to assert that in this case CORE was in complete agreement with not only the aims of the movement, but the strategy of non-violent protest.

After the rally King left the stadium.  In front of a large crowd and with TV film cameras grinding, King took advantage of a reference to his historical namesake and symbolically nailed the Freedom Movement demands on the doors of City Hall.  The demands were:

Real Estate Boards and Brokers

Public statements that all listings will be available on a nondiscriminatory basis.

Banks and Savings Institutions

Public statements of a nondiscriminatory mortgage policy so that loans will be available to any qualified borrower without regard to the racial composition of the area.

The Mayor and City Council

1.      Publication of headcounts of whites, Negroes and Latin Americans for all city departments and for all firms from which city purchases are made.

2.      Revocation of contracts with firms that do not have a full scale fair employment practice.

3.      Creation of a citizens review board for grievances against police brutality and false arrests or stops and seizures.

4.      Ordinance giving ready access to the names of owners and investors for all slum properties.

5.      A saturation program of increased garbage collection, street cleaning, and building inspection services in the slum properties.

Political Parties

The requirement that precinct captains be residents of their precincts.

Chicago Housing Authority and the Chicago Dwelling Association

1.      Program to rehabilitate present public housing including such items as locked lobbies, restrooms in recreation areas, increased police protection and childcare centers on every third floor. 

2.      Program to increase vastly the supply of low-cost housing on a scattered basis for both low and middle income families.

Business

1.      Basic headcounts, including white, Negro and Latin American, by job classification and income level, made public. 

2.      Racial steps to upgrade and to integrate all departments, all levels of employments.

It was a sweeping and ambitious agenda that demanded concessions from every aspect of the power structure.

The renewed campaign kicked off with a focus on open housing demands, protests in front of real estate offices across the city, and marches into white neighborhoods.  These marches were often greeted with jeers—and sometimes violence—by neighborhood residents, most famously in Marquette Parkwhere marchers were showered with bottles, bricks, and stones with little interference from the police.  King himself suffered a minor head wound.

These marches saw the support of white liberals dwindle.  Among the first to bail out was the Catholic Archdiocese.  Although many individual priests, nuns, and lay people continued to stand by King and march with the movement, the Church withdrew its support while marchers strode through the heart of their ethnic parishes.  The editorial pages of the city’s great newspapers denounced the marches as dangerous provocations and blamed the ensuing violence not on angry white mobs, but on the non-violent marchers.

The second aspect of the Movement’s drive was the inauguration of a series of summit meetings with civic leaders to lay out the demands and open negotiations for accommodation.  Some of the first of these were with the Chicago Board of Realtors.  But even these meetings were denounced in the press as thinly veiled extortion.

To his dismay, King saw his dream of Whites and Blacks coming together for justice evaporating in front of his eyes.  The city grew more racially polarized day by day and the phrase White backlash entered the language.

Some authorities were willing to strike at least symbolic deals.  After yet another march, this time in South Deering on August 21, was attacked by a white mob, movement leaders and local politicians arranged the Summit Agreement. King agreed tohalt marches into all-white neighborhoods and to postpone indefinitely the planned march in Cicero. In exchange, the city agreed to far-reaching guarantees for open housing for African Americans.

Despite pleas by King and Bevel, CORE defiantly went ahead with a marchin the all-white ethnic suburb of Cicero in September with about 1,500 participants.  The marchers were, predictably mobbed and mauled.  Despite the protestations of the Freedom Movement that they had nothing to do with the CORE march, they were blamed anyway.

The terms of the Summit Agreement, even those resulting innew ordinances by City Hall, made little actual and practical difference to the lives of ordinary Black Chicagoans.  Raby, who felt snubbed and ignored by King and Bevel, resigned from the CCCO, which soon ceased to function.  However, the new Operation Breadbasket stepped up and continued to press for the goals of the Movement gaining power and influence over the years and making Jesse Jackson a major national figure in his own right.

King and Bevel left the city.  They were disappointed.  King considered the campaign largely afailure and was stung by harsh criticism not just from liberal whites, but from the increasingly influential Black Power movement.  He turned increasingly to anti-Vietnam protests over the next two years as he planned a major push on economic injusticehe called the Poor People’s Campaign which he hoped would re-unite Blacks, whites, Latinos,and Native Americans in a common cause.  Preparations for that campaign were put on hold for the Memphis Garbage Strike and King’s assassination.

In Chicago, the conditions that gave rise to the Freedom Movement boiled overin the West Side Riots of 1967 and the riots following King’s assassination in 1968.

A voting registration and get-out-the-vote off-shoot of the Freedom Movement led by the SCLC’s Hosea Williams helped set the stage for the rise of Black political power in the city and for the eventual election of Mayor Harold Washington.

All part of the legacy of the meeting at Soldier Field.

But, by the way, Chicago remains the most residentially segregated city in the United States.  

Time to inflict more of my juvenilia as published in Apotheosis, the Niles West High Schoolin Skokie, Illinois student literary magazine way back in 1967, which a keen historians will note was shortly after the invention of the wheel.

I was way over-represented in the little book, probably simply because I had the audacity to dump the most material, short prose and poetry alike, into the selection file.  At any rate, most everything I submittedgot printed, which is an indictment of the editing skills of 17 year-olds.

Both of these short poems have spring themes and were completed shortly—probably just days—before the final submission deadline.  Inspired by my Advance Placement English Literature class which had a textbook with a generous selection ofpoetry—something current high school students are seldom even shown—I had been seriously reading verse on my own for the first time.  And it showed.

The first verse proved that mere exposure to quality poetry was not sufficient to inoculate me from committing crappy imitations.  Although I had a potentially interesting central image, I had no idea what the hell to do with it.  I over explained it and contorted a closing.  The piece was inspired by one of the late evening rambles I had lately taken up, mostly on the assumption that it was what broody, melancholy young poetic geniuses did.

A Midnight Stroll Through Early Spring

When the midnight sky is indigo purple rubber

            stretched taught over a lamp

            and pin pricked a million times,

            smally sliced once in cuticle shape

            so that the light from the lamp

            gleams though—but dimly, dimly

And when beneath the rubber sky

            a hostile light of glaring nakedness

            strung loosely over the street

            dances in the wind

Then, because the light dances

            and the wind plays also

            on the black lace twigs

            of the high tree tops

The intricate shadows thus cast

            move smoothly and rapidly

            over the tender, wet nurtured lawn

            and dirtied, cracked sidewalk

And I walk there in anguish

            and step upon the moving shadows

            and crush them thus

            upon the dirtied, cracked sidewalk

—Pat Murfin ‘67      

The second poem was a blatant attempt to ape the style, as far as I understood it, of e.e. cummings with a dash of the Beats a laLawrence Ferlinghetti.  It’s a little better and shows some dim promise.  The most astonishingthing about it was that with its semi-graphic abortion image it was printed at all in a high school publication.  The only explanation is that faculty advisor Richard Gragg slipped it passed Principal Nicholas T. Mannosbecause he was sure the boss would never slog through the effusions of pimply faced, hormonal teenagers.  Likewise conservative parents, of whom the school had plenty, evidently chose only to scan their own progeny’s contributions.  My own mother did read it and nearly fell out of her chair, but she hardly dared draw more attentionto her shame by storming the school and demanding the magazine be squelched and recalled.

April is a Bad Month For…

April is a bad month for Coke

            and the flies

                        gather on the droppings

                                    drop, drop

            while the clods slip off

                        the steal plowshare.

Robins die with boyish arrows

            in their throats,

                        children dance

                                    round and again

            on silver-slick grass

                        of the graveyard.

Abortion with a knitting needle

            and greasy hands

                        interrupts prematurely

            the expected rebirth

                        of earth.

April is a very bad month for Cokes.

—Pat Murfin ‘67

I don’t want to be one of those old fuddy-duddies who bitch and moanthat everything was better in the good ol’ days.  Trust me.  It wasn’t.  Take polio, segregation, child labor, and push lawn mowers for example.  And as much as I once loved banging away on my trusty Smith-Corona, the computer I am working on is way betterand I can get the fruits of my writing labor in front of you eyeballsin a trice.  Nifty.

But what the hell happened to picnics?  I don’t mean just eating outside which humans have been doing since they came down from trees, or wherever they hung out before the magic pixie dust made them something a little different than the other apes.  We have no end of cook outs and barbeques on our private decks and patios.  We munch Red Hots at ballparks.  We grab fast food on the fly and have lunch at the little tables outside, in sprawling urban plazas adorned with monumental modern sculpture, pandemic inspired al fresco spots cleared from parking zones.  There are church events, concerts, carnivals,and family reunions.  We eat outside all the time, weather permitting, and sometimes even when it is discouraging.

It takes more than chowing down outside for a picnic. A picnic was an event and an adventure, the highlight of a week. 

When I was a boy in Cheyenne it meant loading up my Mom’s ’51 Chevy or my Dad’s official State of Wyoming station wagon—not for unofficial use—and heading out on a Sunday Drive—another lost tradition. 

Out from the city we would go, often down gravel roads, in search of, I don’t know, nature of some kind or something.  May be out Happy Jack Road, Vedauwoo Canyon, along some creek out on the Wyoming Herford Ranch, by the Tree Growing Out of the Rock along Highway 30 to Laramie, down to Colorado, or just any enticing spot with shade and a pull off along the road.

When we found a spot, out would come a blanket or two to spread on the ground, which, being Wyoming, was often a little stony, strewn with pine needles and cones, covered in clumps of prairie grass and burrs.  Once smoothed out to my mother’s satisfaction we would unload the wicker hamper, a gallon thermos jug filled with iced tea, tin plates,aluminum tumblers that originally came with cottage cheese in them from the milk man, red checkered napkins, and Woolworth’s stainless steel flat ware.

The menu?  Glad you asked.  Most likely cold fried chicken.  We always had chicken on Sunday, and it was surely a Sunday afternoon, roasted if we were home.  But sometimes, for a more impromptupicnic, just cheese sandwiches with yellow mustard and Miracle Whip cut in half and wrapped in waxed paper.  Sometimes there was a bag of potato chips—rare treat not often on Mom’s shopping lists—or her favorite shoestring potatoes out of a can.  There might also be in covered dishes a potato salad and Van Camp’s Pork & Beans.  On a real good day there would be a plate of deviled eggs.  For dessert, watermelon by the slice or if it had been a cool enough week to use the oven, a homemade cherry pie.

Generally, there was nothing that needed cooking or heating, but once in a great while when we knew there would be a park grill pit, maybe wieners to roast on a sick and marshmallows to toast if we lingered to dusk. 

Not much planned for amusement.  The picnic was the main fun.  Maybe we would bring a rubber ball to toss around between my twin brother Tim, me, and Dad after eating.  If there was a running creek nearby we could roll up our jeans and go wading.  We might have even brought our rods and a coffee can of worms for a little fishing.  But Dad, a great fly fisherman was bored by our drowning the worms under a bobber but dared not pull out his gear for fear of snagging one of our ears on a back cast.  Besides, for him fly fishing was a holyand solitary rite not compatible with noisy children.

Sometimes my brother and I snapped photos with our Kodak Brownies and got back little glossy prints in a week or so from the drug store.  Wish I could find some of those pixnow. 

Quite often we would go hikingand exploring, which usually quickly became an extension of our back yard cowboy and Indian games.  If we were at Vedauwoo we would try to scamperup the steep sides of the box canyon.  When I was twelve I brokemy ankle there, but my Mom thought I was just being whiney about a simple turn.  It was not until it swelled to the size of a grapefruit and turned an angry, ugly color, that she believed me and reluctantly took me to the doctor the next day.

Few picnics ended with anything near that drama, although there could be bickering and yelling in the car on the way home if we were all tired and cranky.  But the next week we were rarin’ to go again.

Millions of American families did more or less the same thing going back to when buggies and farm wagons were used instead of Chevys and substituting farm pastures, beaches, lakes,and city parks for destination.  Graveyards were a surprisingly frequent choice.  In the city the family might have to lug everything on trollies or busses to get to the park or walk for miles with everything packed in a Radio Flyer red wagon.  The menu and other particulars may have varied.  But the idea was the same.

Can you imagine rounding up children today for such an expedition?  “What are we going to do?” “Eat”  “That’s it?”  “Mostly.”  “There’s nothing to do!”  Oh, the wails, oh, the moans.  I know that after a few disastrous trieswith our daughters when they were small, we gave up.

Of course, picnics were not just for families.  They were a great cheap date.  An innocent enough sounding activity that otherwise closely watched young people often got time away from prying eyes.  It could be perfectly romantic; it could also become a sweaty rutting ground.  I suspect more than a few children were conceivedon a picnic blanket.

But no need for that now. 

Of course, picnics were not even uniquelyAmerican, we know, because a lot of French artists found them attractive subjects and displayed that the French often had a more adventuresome take on it than did always prudish Americans.

And even the English, especially the gentry and toffs enjoyed a picnic outing if it was accompanied by servants and elegant accouterments.  But they always looked stiff in acres of crinoline and huge hats for the ladies with gentlemen buttoned up in sporting wool tweeds.

I’ll take our old American version, informality, dirt, dust, ants, mosquitos, sunburn and all.  If only I could find one….

 The first self-adhesive postage stamps issued by the U.S. Post Office in 1847.

On July 1, 1847, the United States Post Office issued its first official adhesive-backed postage stamps.  This was only 7 years after the world’s first stamp, the famous Penny Black, was issued by the British.  Only a handful of other countries, notably Switzerland and Brazil, had adopted pre-paid stamps.

The Post Office issued two stamps.  The 5¢ Benjamin Franklin covered the cost of a half-ounce letter addressed within 300 miles.  There was also a 10¢ stamp featuring George Washington for greater distances.  Lest you think that this was a great bargain, the 5¢ stamp would cost a little less than $1 at the current value of the Dollar.

The cost meant that most local letters were still hand delivered and that long distance ones were still often put in the hands of travelers to carry.  Still, the convenience did cause an increase in use of the Postal system and over time, with the introduction of amenitieslike home delivery and still later Rural Free Delivery, helped create a system that was reliable not just for personal messages, but importantly for business which boomed along with expanded postal use.

As the railroads and other means of modern transportation cut the cost of carrying the mail, the price of postage shrank both in real terms in terms of the relatively modest inflation over the next century.  In 1947, centennial of American postage, a First Class stamp good for up to one ounce cost only 3¢.  That price held steady from 1932-1958.

Prices have risen steadily since then until First Class postage is now 55¢ for the first once and 20¢ for each additional ounce.

The familiar lick-em adhesive back stamps have been phased out.  The United States Postal Service, heirto the Post Office, now issues only self-adhesivestamps with peel-off backs.  But the vast majority of first class postage moves without a conventional stampbut is metered or created and printed from programs sold by the USPS.

The rise of e-mail and other electronic communications have decimated the use of letters for personal communications.  Few people get or receive personal messages by post anymore.  Many bills are now paid online or by automatic withdrawal drastically reducing both mailed bills and remittances.   The rising cost of Second and Third Class and Bulk mailings have also put a dent in advertising, as business looks for cost effective alternatives to junk mail.  Then the Postal service saw a huge fall off in use and revenue after the 2008 economic collapse.

The is in Postal Service in perpetual crisis, constantly raising pricesto meet costs, saddled with a system designed for much greater volume, and considering severe cutbacks including the reduction of home delivery to four, or even three days a week. 

This trend came to a head last year during the 2020 presidential campaign.  Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, an ardent mail privatizer and an investor in logistics companies with current contracts with the USPS, began a systematic dismantling of postal services including the removal of collection boxes and curtailed hours for letter carriers that predictably caused huge delays in deliveryand put vote by mail in peril.  Outrage over the blatant attempt to interfere in the election caused DeJoy to walk-back some of his alleged “efficiency reforms” but other hollowing-out of the Postal Service is still on track.  President Joe Biden has fired members of the Board of Governors and will appoint replacements, but DeJoy can remain in charge for the rest of his 10 year term unless Congress intervenes. 

But even with all the trouble a belt-tightened Postal Service would today be in the black and not threatened with draconian cuts.  A provision stealthily slipped into the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA)in 2006 by Republicans set the service up to collapse.  PAEA was a supposedly bi-partisan effort to streamline and modernize the Postal Service to meet the reality of modern needs.  It called for the closure of marginal Post Offices, increased use of automation and technology, and the commiserate reduction of personnel.  But a little noticed provision required that the Service fully pre-fund future retiree health benefits for the next 75 years within a ten-year window.   This means that the Postal Service is required to send to the U. S. Treasury$5.5 billion each September 30.   This is to pay for the future retirement health benefits of workers who haven’t even been born yet. 

No other public or private health benefits system requires this kind of pre-payment.  Most are pay-as-you-go systems funding benefits for a year or two in advance.  This guaranteed that the Postal Service would go broke and into a crisis that would cause Congress to require drastic service cuts that would doom the agency.  The idea was to force the takeover of as many services as possible by private enterprise.  A major motivating factor was the prospect of decimating and ultimately destroying the unionized Postal Service workers.  The destruction of the Postal Unions would be a blow to Democrats who benefit from the support of organized labor.

The Postal Service is supposed to function as a profit making business, which is virtually impossible under the circumstances, and not as an essential public service.  So, the future of the mail—and postage stamps is open to doubt.