Postage stamp of ‘The Thousand Yard Stare’    The road snaked up the low hills that overlook Bellaire. Steep at times, the asphalt was cracked and narrow driveways led off from the curves into little houses perched perilously on the slope. Most of the cars seemed to be operable to some degree, and I […]

(Lincoln, with snow and parking ticket) I have to say that if you are going to drive nearly two thousand miles on a Holiday Weekend, a big Detroit car is the way to go. The paper that was delivered yesterday to the house on the bluff above the Bay in northern Michigan, talked about General […]

  Dammit, Bill. How could you do this to all your fans?  I know there was some major fence-building to be done with the Clintons. But to get aced out by Billary for State is just demeaning. And then to settle for Commerce. Jeeze. Where are we going to go with that? I had to think fast. […]

We were at the bar last night, and the Capital City Brewery was doing a roaring business. We normally have the far left corner of the big horseshoe under the towering vats of micro-brew to ourselves, but we wound up jammed against a party of women lawyers having a farewell party for one of their […]

(Bob Barker)   OK- I got it.   You have suffered through the Bonus Army, and more than a few have sampled the offers, interspersed with bouts of small but profound sadness and wonder at the ways of the wider world. One Big Pink friend skims these things for portents about how I am doing, […]

(MacArthur with ribbons, Dwight without)   It is winter in Washington, and the first flurries blew through town yesterday, more than a week before Thanksgiving. The Folks back home in Michigan said they got socked with a real snowfall, nearly six weeks earlier than they did last year.   If this is global warming, it […]

(View of the Capital from Camp Marks)   When Douglas MacArthur became the army’s youngest Chief of Staff in 1930, the most highly regarded staff officer in the War Department was a young Major named Dwight Eisenhower. Even before his assignment to the Army’s general staff at the Munitions Building on the Mall in late […]

I got a text last night that Uncle Harold was in Hospice, and that the end was near.   His family was with him, and they watched NASCAR on the tube. Harold put on his USMC hat, and was lucid and in good spirits.   He left us in the early hours this morning, at […]

(MacArthur mops as Dwight enjoys a smoke, 1932)  My Grandfather was a professional railroad man, and a citizen soldier for a brief time in the Great War. He was a working man, and the ranks of the Bonus Army were filled with those just like him. Working stiffs, common men who were badly hurt by […]

Bonus Expeditionary Force at the Capitol, 1932   Ah, what a year it had been! The economy was in the crapper, and the world was shambling into a place that no one wanted to go. Everything seemed to be interconnected in a way that it never had been before the steamship and the locomotive and […]