Anniversary

So, on the 30th of June, 1919, the ill-omened Treaty of Versailles had just been signed, Jack Dempsey was preparing for the match that'd win him the heavyweight boxing championship, and wily, determined, selectively generous old Andrew Carnegie was on his deathbed. Earlier that year the buying, selling, swigging, sipping, tippling, and/or drinking became against the Law and too, the country, desperate to return to a normalcy that probably never existed was all hot & bothered with a Red Scare.

Harry Truman and Bessie, his blond bride of 2 days, were off honeymooning. Meanwhile, in Cameron, Missouri, beautiful dark-haired Eulah Brown was being married to redheaded, blue-eyed Albert Harley Wolfe, just home from the Western Front. And here I am, one of their 10 grandchildren, 91 years later, letting you know about them. Harley, as he was known, was given up for adoption when he was a boy in Illinois, him and his sisters, by their father, James Wolfe. His wife, whose name is lost (to me anyway), had died. The youngest sister was Emma, a red-haired 3-year-old, when she was put aboard an orphan train. A childless Minnesota couple, the Stickneys, adopted her, changing her name to Alice....

So, my old man's favorite actress, Susan Hayward, was born on the last day of June, summer of 1917. The U.S. had just entered the Great War.  And sure,  countless souls have come in or gone out through the cosmic door marked June 30.  I know it doesn't matter all that much, these little factoids.  Little invitations to remember, that's all.  So long June, month of roses and renegade petroleum. Deadliest month for our troops in Afghanistan in all these nine long years of war.  So long June. Let's see what July will bring....

So, I dressed myself in my calico gown last Tuesday morning (the 22nd of June, 2nd day of summer, 104th anniversary of the day that Billy Wilder & Anne Morrow Lindbergh were born), and headed off to SE Kansas the other day. I set out from one Independence to another, down where the storied Ingalls family lived some 140 years ago. I confess that my scuffed-up heart fluttered at the sight of the Verdigris River, only because my 8-year-old self learned about it in Mrs. Wilder's L. H. on the P. One of the best parts of doing my books over the years has been getting to visit places of which I'd read. When I was researching for my Lincoln books, you'd better know that my heart skipped when I sped past a sign on a freeway bridge reading Sangamon County. I'd come into that lanky man's home country.

Out in the shade behind the replica of THE L. H. on the P. I had the pleasure of visiting with some kindred spirits from India, Pennsylvania and Japan. Their admiration of L.I.W., who'd been a skippy little brown-haired girl right thereabouts, had brought them, by way of a tour arranged by Barbara and George Hawkins. http://lhsitetours.homestead.com/ And don't think I didn't tip my hat to gritty commerce and mention my L.I.W. Coloring Book, available in the gift shop.

Home again, by way of Fort Scott, Kansas, and off again to Burr Oak, Iowa, for Laura Days. The Ingallses lived there too, in that beautiful, green and rolling country up by the Minnesota line for a little while, around 1876, the Centennial Year. It was in the summer of that year (June 25), when that horrid battle went down at Little Big Horn, Montana. I've been gallivanting rather than writing about inspiring pulpit-pounder Henry Ward Beecher, who was born June 24, 1813, or the anniversaries of the U.N. Charter or the Korean invasion or the 1914 assassinations in Sarajevo or Helen Keller's and Pearl Buck's birthdays and old Senator Byrd's deathday and so the summer steams on and the big wheel keeps on turning. Did I tell you that tomorrow tomorrow makes 91 years since .... never mind. It's time to think of today.

A Little More June

Summertime journeys, I was thinking about, as I sped down the highway in my temperature-controlled box-on-wheels. Doing my best to stay out of the June heat. Crossing a bit of bridge over a slow-moving creek in the blink of an eye. Thinking about long-gone travelers out in the hot wind.  Squinting at black clouds in the west or a line of dark green that meant water for you and the stock and/or getting yourselves & your wagon from one bank to another.

Meadowlarks. Sun beating down. Grasses, blowing, brushing, catching in your skirts.  Butterflies swooping. Iron & wood wheels turning. Four-leggers plodding, walking, walking alongside their two-leggers, walking alongside a wagon carrying all the folks could pack into it, all they'd have to get along with in the next chapter of their lives.  uff da.

Little House

So, now it's the steamy time of year, a fine time to be heading down the road.  And where to? To visit the earnest replica of the log house,  built by Charles Ingalls, back when U.S. Grant was the U.S. president. Wanna go sometime? Wanna read more about it?  www.littlehouseontheprairie.com 

It took me about 4 hours to cover the 200 miles or so between Independence, MO & Independence, KS. Windows UP. Cool air blasting.  I'll not blather about the obvious differences between my junket and the Ingalls family's migrations. No need. Complicated though it is, modern life sure as heck has its compensations.  Is there more to say about this day?  Oh, very much more, but not now....

Alden

So, according to my calendar & all of the dad-related hoohah in the paper, on the radio, greeting card racks, & elsewhere, this warm and steamy Sunday is not set aside for Errol Flynn's 101st birthday or noting that Louis & Antoinette of France tried to escape their pissed off subjects on this day in 1791,( to no avail). A quick scan tells me that the Brits, still in high imperial clover, got themselves a new monarch on this day in 1837: 18-year-old Victoria. Some years earlier, in 1756, furious Bengalis consigned 146 British prisoners to a "black hole" in Calcutta, India. Some say that 123 of the crammed-together captives died most dreadfully, crushed, too hot, no air... Some say, too, that the horrid deal was made up propaganda. Nasty. And Pancho Villa of Mexico was killed today, in 1923. My dad Raymond Harness, would've been 10 days past his 1st birthday, the first of some eighty birthdays. 'What do you want for your birthday?' we'd ask him. "Peace & quiet." I reckon he's got it now. Or not. Getting what he wanted wasn't his custom.

His father, Clarence Lee Harness, might have been home. Or not. He was a restless sort and full of sadness for his lot in life, abandoned by his own dad, Alden Harness. It's said that Clarence (Granpap, to us, a sly old fellow with peppermints in his pockets) would rather have pity than a new hat. Where did his old man get off to? California, maybe.... Alden Senior and his wife Sarah pretty much stayed put in Missouri until their deaths in the summer of 1884. What's left of them rests under a limestone obelisk in a Baptist churchyard outside of Chilhowee, Mo. And the bones of the fathers and the fathers? Beats me. I don't reckon it matters, really, any more than the long-gone queen of England.

Juneteenth

So, 145 years ago it was, summer of 1865. Future writers W.B. Yeats & Rudyard Kipling; a future president [Wm. Harding] and a future king [Geo. V of the Brits] and Laura Ingalls big sister Mary, were newborn or about to be. Lewis Carroll & Mary Mapes Dodge were fixing to publish their adventures of Alice and of Hans Brinker. Lincoln, along with his murderer, J.W. Booth, and hundreds of thousands of other souls had gone to their reward, courtesy of the great & terrible Civil War. It was finally over & had been for a little while now, but only now, the 19th of June, 1865, did the news finally make its way to Galveston, Texas, that people, heretofore held in bondage, were free, as far as the U.S. government was concerned. It's said that these folks were the last to be told the great, long-yearned-for news. So it is that, "Juneteenth," as the great day was dubbed, is commemorated and celebrated. Properly so.

With this, I am off to a memorial service for a friend who took me in for a while, back in the day.