When socialism just looks like being a good neighbor

The latest fad in political reporting involves "Democratic Socialists," which is something I didn't realize was a thing until a few months ago. I'm not sure it is a thing in reality, BTW, and I will hazard a guess that few voters really understand whatever the concept is.

I know "socialism" is a dirty word in American politics, with the traditional American reluctance to let go of our fabled independence while embracing our hatred of government. No wonder we are a messy country.

I also know that a lot of what I value about the country is at least "socialism adjacent." We can start with Social Security, which many claim we have all invested in over many years and are just "getting back what is ours." But I, for one, will be receiving far more in benefits than the amount I contributed, even considering interest. Medicare is quite similar, though I continue to hope that I don't need all that much from that particular safety net program.

I pay taxes each year into local, state, and national government with little idea of how my money will be used. I do know that I am paying a lot more than many extremely wealthy Americans, but I am not really angry about it. After all, that tax money provides all sorts of great things that benefit me, and my neighbors more generally. 

Nice roads are one of those things. Municipal lighting is another. I expect police and fire fighters, if they are needed, and expect that those services will arrive quickly (if rarely, of course). 

I am a supporter of unions, and happily paid my minimal dues into various teacher associations for decades. I never needed the help of a union rep, which seems positive, but it was nice to know there would be someone available. I appreciated union officials investing many, many hours in negotiations over salary and benefits. I gladly donated sick leave to "banks" for teachers in need. I never was a booster of "merit pay," preferring to be part of a system that supported all teachers and avoided ranking systems. 

I served in the military, not willingly, but... I "lost" three years of my life, in a sense, though there were some great things that came out of the experience. One was G.I. Bill, that paid over $300 a month for me to attend school over several years and those years allowed me to earn a B.A. and an M.A. Most of my fellow veterans did not take advantage of G.I. Bill benefits, I am sure, but we all paid in. 

My view is that I have (perhaps naively) assumed that society would support me at some basic level if disaster occurred. When I tripped and broke my hip some years ago, police and an ambulance were there within just a few minutes. I did not have to give them my credit card, though I certainly paid for most of those services since my insurance only covered so much. 

I am not anti-capitalist, though I am skeptical about many aspects of the system. Mostly, I don't trust the extremely rich and don't hesitate to blame that elite group for many American problems. 

I have never owned a business. In fact, I have always been employed by some governmental entity, whether the Air Force or Regina HS or City HS or Heritage HS or Rock Canyon HS or Colorado State University or Metro State University. Oh, I guess I did work for Jostens for one miserable year when we lived in Arizona, but that is barely a blip in my history. 

I trust government to solve problems and "bend toward better" over time. The few politicians I have actually met and spoken with seem like they genuinely would like to make things better, though I am well aware of the Mitch McConnells of the world who are in it solely for the power. 

Individuals seem both "basically good people" as well as "dumb as posts," and we are collectively not nearly as good as we should be. Yet I still assume good intent when I walk the neighborhood or drive the streets or even fly the skies. 

I will end my interminable list here, but I am pretty sure I am a Democratic Socialist. I won't buy the water bottle or attach a bumper sticker, nor join that "party," if it exists.  

Time to print what I have. There's no second draft without a first.

I will soon be publishing a book... the history of the first 25 years of St. Luke's United Methodist Church in Highlands Ranch, covering 1979-2004. It's going to be nearly 150 pages and I will be publishing using Kindle Direct Publishing from Amazon. Anyone wanting a copy can order through Amazon and the company handles printing "on demand" as well as shipping and handling the money.

That paragraph above is full of stuff that might need further explanation, it occurs to me. 

Before you ask: No one asked me to research and write this book, and I have no idea if anyone will ever buy a copy, much less read it. I won't be making money on it. Right now the estimate is that I might earn as much as 63 cents per sale in royalties. Alert the accountant! 

I have been conducting interviews, making phone calls, scouring the internet, browsing print materials from the past, including an invaluable scrapbook compiled by a woman who died about a month after Kathleen and I joined St. Luke's in fall of 2002. I have become friends with two former ministers, both now in the 80s but quite "with it." That is something I would never have predicted. 

I have also designed the book and will be able to upload the PDFs of the letter-sized pages as soon as Kathleen and I complete one more reading of the content. There will be a few errors, I assume, but my sense is that the narrative will be readable and logical, even if incomplete in many areas. 

The history is at times dramatic and at times a bit mysterious and occasionally surprising. I was not here for most of it and really could not be classified under "religious guy." I have avoided attributing good or bad luck in this history to some celestial plan. What fascinates me in the history are the people and the unlikely connections many of them share. 

In many ways, I am the last person who should be writing this history, but perhaps distance from the events allows me to produce something interesting. I guess I will find out soon.

My original plan was to write the history up to today, but the more I dug, the more I wanted to include. And when I saw the pages count going toward 140, it was easy to leave the "second 25 years" to a later date (and a second volume). In fact, I am not all that excited about writing a "next volume," assuming that when some people read the first volume, I will suddenly receive emails and find myself buttonholed by folks after church or in King Soopers who want to disabuse me of some notion I included in the book. I anticipate lots of "how could you leave out...?" questions and my only response will be "sorry, but did you see how long this thing is now?" 

I honestly hope I do hear from people. The great thing about online publishing (I don't what else to call the KDP service) is that it's relatively simple to upload a "second edition" of the book, and a third. I can make changes on my own desktop computer and I don't have to worry about "sunk costs" of inventory sitting in the garage. 

It was never my intention to make a nickel on this project, so that simplifies things. I would call it a retirement project that is as close to a hobby as I can come. 

There is satisfaction in discovering answers to questions, which I suppose I have known for a long time and have certainly taught to so many student journalists over the years. But it's been instructive to be in the role of writer as opposed to writing teacher. One role informs the other, that's for sure. 

Interestingly, I often say to friends that I am ready to finally publish the "damn book." It's been in works for some time. I began the research in June of 2024 and have invested hundreds of hours in this enterprise. But as the time to upload it (and learn all the ins and outs of Kindle Direct Publishing) nears, I wonder if I will find excuses to hold off. 

Nah! Time to get this book out in the world and move on to new projects. I have been toying with doing some family history writing about the Kennedy and Guffey sides of the clan. 

And then there will be those inevitable corrections and expanded explanations and all new characters and anecdotes that the first volume will produce. Could be fun.

Texas religious conservatives are about to catch the car... then what?

This was coincidence, but brother Joe mentioned during a quick call the other day that one of the things he remembered most clearly from being in my class at Regina was the "Bible as Literature" unit within junior year English class.

Then yesterday I read a compelling post in The Atlantic that argued for inclusion of reading Bible passages/stories as part of a well-rounded education. That was prompted by a Texas board of education choice to require selected readings in grades 4-12 in the state's public schools.

There are at least two unlikely things to consider between those two facts. One is that Catholic school is relatively Bible-free, it turns out. I don't recall ever being required to read the Bible in my own Catholic high school years, for instance. The passages read on Sundays during mass were rigidly prescribed by the powers that be and priests rarely attempted to modernize Scripture for the masses. Ritual was way more important than whatever exhortations a priest might offer.

For the Atlantic, the supposedly ultra-liberal publication, to come down even in the same ballpark as the religious conservatives of Texas seems a bit surprising. 

After all, we live in the age of knee jerk reactions and "give no quarter" arguments. If a religious conservative likes something, a modern progressive is expected to adopt an opposite position.

I honestly don't remember much about that Bible unit in 1979. I do remember that it was pretty easy to get copies of the Bible for everyone in a time when we didn't have much money for new texts. In fact, they may have been free. I also remember a vague sense of fun in taking young minds into the actual Good Book and talking about it much as we would a novel. I know most of my students had never opened a Bible until that unit.

It's a fine collection of classic stories and is often so strange and remote from our current lives that we can feel comfortable cracking some jokes or pointing out scientific errors. When I moved to City High, a public school, there was a trimester-length course called Bible as Literature, and I don't recall any brouhaha over its inclusion in the curriculum. The "as Literature" seemed descriptive enough for most of the public.

In today's Texas politics, requiring students to read the Sermon on the Mount or the Book of Job may seem like a victory for Christian true believers. But my prediction is that such a victory is likely to produce chaos, lawsuits, and unintended consequences. 

Imagine a second-year ELA teacher having units containing Biblical passages dropped into their curriculum and suddenly engaging in philsophical debate and discussion about meaning and spirituality with a room full of juniors. My guess is that parents will very quickly begin objecting to almost anything that is said. 

After all, the Sermon on the Mount extols all sorts of virtues and the virtuous who are out of favor in modern times. Kids won't be reading something about "Blessed are the billionaires" -- more likely they might discuss the difficulty of a rich man entering the Kingdom of Heaven (I know, different parable). 

My sense is that most modern politicians haven't read very deeply in the Bible and I am equally sure that even top scholars will argue for all sorts of interpretations. That young teacher doesn't stand a chance.

But ignoring the looming chaos: My long-held view that for a person to be able to fully engage in the thought and tradition of the Western World (where we live, after all), that person needs to be familiar with at least basic Bible stories and passages. And with Shakespeare. 

It's not that the Bible or Shakespeare are inherently superior in insights or language use or morality, but that they have been so influential for so long. I might argue something similar about the need for an educated American to have a passing knowledge of baseball, BTW. We use phrases and analogies from that once mighty game all the time. 

There are plenty of additional important books and poems and stories that a Texas student would do well to be aware of and understand. I would never argue that all a person needs is one big book and a collection of plays to be educated. 

But this Texas curriculum change is more likely to get kids thinking deeply about the immoral and downright evil Trump administration than turn kids into religious zealots.

Also worth considering it that once we require a kid to read something, that assignment becomes part of "school work." Just something else to get through. But maybe, just maybe, some of the material will stick with some kids. And maybe a very few will want to learn more and do their own reading, even without the threat of a pop quiz.

Fill in the blank: "Blessed are the ___________, for they will be called children of God."

And don't say "cheesemakers." But if you are watching Monty Python's "Life of Brian," knowing the answer adds to the fun. And don't we all want to be in on the joke?

A basketball player and a symbol of America's original sin... for some

Having avidly watched almost every game Caitlin Clark has played over the past severn years (four at Iowa and now the third in the WNBA), I must admit to being an unabashed fan. Would I feel the same if she had chosen UConn or Notre Dame instead of my alma mater for her college years? 

Probably not. Would I even watch WNBA games regularly were it not for her entering the league? Again, probably not. I don't have unlimited spare time to engage with every sport that cable TV offers. Just as I pick and choose the Netflix shows I invest in, I pick and choose the teams I follow. I don't always choose the best teams, BTW. After all, I will still go to channel 1262 and watch the Rockies from time to time. They are not great but can be entertaining. 

So I am anything but a longtime observer of the WNBA, particularly compared to some sports columnists who cover those women for a living. 

But a recent column by USA columnist Nancy Armour has created quite a controversy and I must admit that I am surprised by the claims she makes in that column as well as the more general zeitgeist and Caitlin Clark. 

As critical positions are often constructed, Armour hastens to claim that she is "no Caitlin Clark hater." She mentions her player of the week award, for instance, and several times praises her ability. But he argument is that a) Caitlin Clark does too much flopping, and b) the more she complains, the more she encourages racist behavior by at least some of her fans. 

I often wonder what the correct amount of flopping might be, though I have long wished Caitlin were a bit less vocal and outraged over basic fouls. Armour never mentions her lost playing time due to injuries in her column, and my guess is that at least some of her physical issues result from rough play. I will also note that she never missed a college game in four years, and many teams certainly wanted to "take her out" of her game, triple team her, etc. She was often knocked down but always got up.

Armour took a slight detour into how flopping is not that uncommon. After all, we have just seen so much of it during the World Cup. She also is content to make her own judgment calls about Caitlin's complaints, as in "come on... it's a tough league and you're a big girl" -- she never wrote that but that was what comes across. Armour dismisses any hint of jealousy from those who hound her everywhere on the court, about those who resent a skinny white girl stealing the limelight.

But then she goes to this paragraph: 

It shouldn’t need reminding this country has an awful history of Black people being harmed, even killed, in the name of “defending” white women. The irony of the WNBA's All-Star Game is that it's happening this weekend in Chicago, the hometown of Emmett Till, who became an icon of the civil rights movement after his tragic murder. The local art gallery is currently hosting an exhibit imagining his life if he hadn't been lynched. While it’s incumbent on the WNBA to do more to protect its players, there also should be an expectation on Clark to recognize the broader implications of her actions being weaponized.

I guess everyone with a forum is entitled to critique Caitlin Clark. She doesn't fit some neat mold of the All-American girl who suffers blows and disdain but keeps focused on the next play without complaint. She does complain. It seems like a lot to ask but it at least is a criticism with some evidence we can examine. She is certainly beloved by teammates and coaches and multituds of young kids, including grandson Jack. I see she is funding an $11 per ticket night for a future Fever game to allow those without unlimited means to enjoy a game. She signs autographs and grants interviews patiently and plentifully.

But to suggest that each time she objects to a foul (I would argue that she is not flopping so much as demonstrating the result of some impressively strong and aggressive women trying to slow her down), she is making racism worse in America is, well, outrageous.

We are one screwed up country, with a significant amount of racism and sexism and general corruption, but the idea that one young white woman should be playing basketball in such a way as to protect the nation's identity and solve all those systemic problems... that is nuts. 

It's the All-Star game Saturday, and Caitlin will be joining mostly Black athletes in that weird tradition that marks a break in the season and provides the league and the TV hosts and networks another large check. I hope she plays well and I assume there will be camaraderie galore, since winning and losing is not the point for that game.

Nothing will be said about Nancy Armour, BTW, though I will note that she herself is another white woman feeling the need to comment on society and on one young, gifted player who pretty much single-handedly injected life into the WNBA. But since CC lives in America, she can't just be a basketball player whining about crappy calls. Caitlin Clark now has been made the Queen of racists who are just looking for ways to troll their neighbors.

That doesn't seem right.

Nine-year-old flashes artistic skill in two diary entries

This is an unusual spread from dad's 1938 diary... unusual primarily because he rarely included any illustrations (though his innate artistic talent is quite clear). There are several mentions of playing paper dolls, sandwiched around the Baldwins coming over on Sunday. Perhaps this was mandated by Grandma demanding he not mess up his clothes. But the paper dolls reappear on Monday, so...

In other diary entries, paper dolls were occasionally described as "fun," but that Sunday's experience elicted the equivalent of shouting "No Fun." 

Here's an educated guess as to whom "the Baldwins" referred to: Leo and Anna Baldwin lived in Tiffin and ran the local grocery story and post office station. They had daughter Betty Jean, who was a year older than Dorothy and graduated from St. Patrick's School and, later, Iowa. Dorothy's son John Kisner remembers his mom often mentioning Betty Jean... certainly one of her long-time friends. 

Betty Jean Baldwin married Charles Eicher in 1950 and Dr. Eicher may or may not have assisted with my delivery at Mercy Hospital. My apologies to Betty Jean Baldwin Eicher if the illustration iss not her. That girl appears haughty and a bit scary, and she would have been 13 at the time and likely disdainful of a pesky kid. In my imagination, the NO FUN reflects his annoyance with Betty Jean or Dorothy or both.

Monday's entry is typical until we get to "Slept with Mom to protect her," along with a vivid drawing (complete with all those ZZZZZs) of that event from ceiling height perspective. 

There is no mention of what my grandmother needed protecting from on June 20, or anywhere else in the diary. This was a one-time event, evidently. We might even speculate about who was protecting whom here. I particularly appreciate the caption for the illustration, though I wish dad had added a bit of context. 

But he wasn't writing for me.

By the way, an earlier vivist from the Baldwins -- from Sunday, April 24 -- received rave reviews. He wrote that day that they brought Betty Jean home after church, eventually playing not only with paper dolls but playing "cops and robbers," described as "lots of fun." High praise. 

The Baldwins came to dinner later, picking up their daughter. Dad writes that they "played Grand National. Fun." That is the lone mention of that game, which likely referred to a board game that mimicked the British horse race, with dice and betting as the "track" included unpredictable hurdles. Well, that's what I found online. 

If dad awarded the coveted "fun" designation, my guess is that he did well.  

He missed the big war, but another was looming

Kathleen was on Ancestry today and clicked on a link she had not noticed that connected military documents with my father's general information. They are scans of the original small cards that were filled in by hand, but are filled with interesting information.

Oh dear, you are thinking. "Interesting" is part of the curse: "May you live in interesting times." We are currently living in "interesting times," so I get it. But it's my blog...

The first of the two documents is dad's original selective service registration card, which was dated Sept. 6, 1946, just two days after his 18th birthday. His address was RFD #3, Iowa City, so he was still living on the farm. He was listed as a student at State University of Iowa. SUI changed to the University of Iowa in 1964, which I had to look up, but I do remember WSUI, the campus radio station that still operates on 910 AM. 

That station was the NPR outlet that I regularly chose to play when ferrying children around town in my car. "Oh no! Not AM radio!" they would complain. Their preference would have been KRNA, our local rock station. 

His phone number was "18 F 11" and that is both interesting and mysterious. Not sure exactly how that was dialed or if the operator had to make that connection. 

On the back of the card was a physical description. Dad was listed at 6 feet, 190 pounds, with blue eyes and brown hair. His complexion was listed as "Ruddy." Other options included sallow, light, dark, freckled, light brown, dark brown, and black. I don't recall ever thinking of dad as being "reddish" or "rosy," but he was just out of high school, or maybe Margarite Gatens, the Johnson County registrar who signed the form, was just bored.

The second document Kathleen found is his updated registration card, from Sept. 13, 1948. "Complexion" was no longer a category on the form, but he had grown an inch and gained tn pounds. His mailing address was listed as 528 Iowa Avenue, despite the fact that he was living in Freeport, working in advertising for the Freeport Journal Standard newspaper. 

We were between wars at the time and the WWII draft expired in 1947. I had to look this up, but during the roughly one-year "draft holiday" that followed, the United States relied on voluntary enlistments. However, due to dwindling enlistment numbers and escalating Cold War tensions, President Harry S. Truman signed the new Selective Service Act of 1948 in June 1948, which officially reinstated the peacetime draft. Recent Iowa grad John Kennedy had to register once again.

He joined the Illinois National Guard 66th Fighter Wing as a private on June 23, 1948, and he may have gone to basic training that summer, though I have only the faintest memories of anyone ever talking about this. It will take more research to discover how long he was in the National Guard, but he was never called up to active duty. 

The 66th Fighter Wing was not activated between 1950 and 1952; instead, it was inactivated on October 31, 1950, and folded into the new U.S. Air Force. It might have helped that he was the father of two children by May of 1952, of course, and there was a deferment for fathers. But I found that President Eisenhower changed the Class III deferment in 1953, and the new requirement was to show that your induction would cause extreme and harmful financial damage to your family. 

I don't know if he ever had to argue his case, but I'm pretty sure he didn't have much money in the early '50s. 

Final thought for today: In an earlier post I wrote that 528 Iowa Avenue was purchased in 1950 by Grandpa from Emma Dunkel, widow of the previous owner. That remains true, but the 1948 document indicates that the family was occupying that house prior to September of 1948. Maybe renting? 

Every time I think I have found "the truth," I am disabused of that notion. But I will carry on with my family history musings and explorations. You have been warned.

The older I get, the less I seem to know

I was surprised to find the records of the sale of 528 Iowa Avenue, which I had always known as my grandparents Jack and Adelaide Kennedy’s house, but that sale occurred in 1950. So, dad and Dorothy had to have attended high school and college while still living in the big farmhouse west of town.

Dorothy was a star student at St. Patrick’s, graduating as Valedictorian in 1944, before earning her degree from Iowa. Dad attended St. Pat’s for two years and then transferred to University HS, Iowa’s lab school in the College of Education. Why he did so remains a mystery, and the few souls who might have known took the secret to their graves. Dad managed to graduate in 1945, which means he must have begun school early or skipped a grade. He was a smart guy, so it might have been either reason.

The story that my brother Mike and I remember was that Grandma Kennedy had been lobbying to move to town for some time. She certainly put a lot of miles on the car driving in and out of Iowa City on Melrose, if dad’s diary entries are a good indication.

A suitable house came on the market, one that Albert and Emma Dunkel owned for many years. Albert was quite a local character, and the Dunkel family added a lot to Iowa City history.

Albert was a businessman and musician (he led a small orchestra that played locally) and he was known as Punch. He died in 1947 and his widow Emma was who sold the Iowa Avenue home to Grandpa. Punch had run several businesses, including the Pastime Theater.

I mention this because dad’s diary mentions attending 11 movies just during the month of March in 1938. The Pastime is mentioned specially, along with the Varsity, Englert, and Iowa theaters. Dad went to movies multiple times a week, usually with his mom and sister.

The fact that the home of the longtime owner of the Pastime would eventually become my grandparents’ home is one of those coincidences we should probably expect in a smallish town.

The theater was located at 205 E. College, was renamed the Capitol after Punch’s estate sold it in 1947, and closed in 1960 before being demolished when the block came down during Iowa City’s urban renewal phase. I vaguely recall seeing some animated films there… maybe Disney cartoons.

I wish I had kept a diary in my youth. That would be handy in trying to reconstruct events from many decades ago. I also wish I had been as organized as dad in how he rated the movies he saw (and when you go to at least two a week, you have earned some perspective): Rotten, OK, Good, and Swell, with “swell” being the highest rank.

So why would I be surprised to learn that the family did not move to Iowa City until 1950? My explanation is that a young kid doesn’t ask questions about the past too often and that I likely was so focused on my own monumental life experiences that it never occurred to me that there had been much history prior to my entering the picture.

I thought my dad and aunt lived in town when in high school – but was clearly mistaken – and I do remember that Dorothy had a bedroom on the second floor, looking out on the street. She might have lived there through college and beyond. I would guess that dad didn’t live there at all.

The house featured a somewhat steep but quite small front yard that sloped down to the sidewalk and I remember having to ride my bike over there from University Heights on many summer days to mow the lawn. That sloped front yard was my bane and it didn’t help that their lawnmower was a manual. Turns out I was not all that strong, I guess. The backyard was perfectly square and flat and backed to an alley. Nice and easy for mowing.

The good news about being sent by my mother to mow that yard was that Grandma would always offer pop and candy for my trouble. There was also a small grocery store called Pecina’s across Iowa Avenue that was one of the few stores willing to sell an entire box of baseball cards at a time. I remember the cost as being $3 or $4, but that may be low. There were 36 packs of cards in a box.

Gene Wandling and I would bike to the store occasionally when we had each accumulated enough money from our paper routes and then revel in opening each pack of ten cards, trading them, always searching for a Mickey Mantle card or some other gem.

I read that an unopened “wax box” of baseball cards from 1960 would go for $200K today. Keeping even an unopened PACK of cards would have been unthinkable back then, and I routinely would attach cards to my bike spokes to make cool noises as I sped through the streets. 

That small grocery closed in the mid-1960s, as larger groceries took their business. Hy-Vee’s first store in Iowa City opened in 1957 and Pecina’s was an eventual victim of that major chain’s success.

And now the idea of collecting baseball cards doesn’t come up much in popular culture. I did keep a large box of my favorite cards, and it was stored when I left for the Air Force in an upstairs closet in the Woodridge house.

When I went to retrieve them in the mid-1970s, I learned that mom had made the executive decision to toss them. She did not toss my stamp collection, which I still have and which is now worth about nothing. But that’s for another tale.

I will just note that the price of a first-class stamp rose to 82 cents last Sunday. A first-class stamp in my youth was 3 cents.

But the service is better, right?