Where's all the failure?

Great Caesar's Ghost! I have been looking around at other blogs. There's an education. What in the world am I doing in here with these people?

Most everything I have seen is either artsy-craftsy or foreign. By foreign I mean literally not in English. Many in Spanish, a few in Greek, one in Arabic, others in languages I was unable to identify. But even the non-English blogs were artsy in nature; lots of dramatic photos (closeups of flowers, men staring blankly at unseen women, a vase on a shelf).

The ones that I could read and weren't overly arty were either commercial, blatently advertising a product or service; or incredibly detailed documentaries of intricate hobbies. There are a lot of amateur food critics out there, and also a wealth of gardening enthusists. Along with them are the Renaissence people that describe themselves as celebrants of nearly everything: politics, architecture, geneology, medicine, literature, theatre; you name it, they have an opinion on it. Blogging must be the greatest thing in the world for university professors and some of their graduate assistants--a bullhorn through which they can blat their massive knowledge to the world.

Just a handful are by moms about their families, sort of a diary written for the ages in cyberspace. Everything else is the pretentious, artsy type of blog with lots of photos, incredibly busy desktops crowded with country-inspired print designs, and a paragraph about the flower that was examined that day. Some are maintained by actors or others with theatrical bones. And a few are into their careers as authors, people required to travel the world, chefs and so on.

What seems lacking are garden-variety people writing about their lives and how the events of the day affect them. Bloggers seem to be a gifted, successful group. Where are all the divorced men lamenting about their wives who soaked them in the settlement? Does a lineman for Power & LIght ever write about how a freak storm in Louisiana took him away from his family for a month? I keep hearing about the legions of workers laid off daily by cold, uncaring--hateful, actually--employers concerned only about maintaining double-digit bottom lines. Where are those blogs? Does a medical student, an engineer, an under-employed lawyer ever write about daily doings?

It just seems like there should be some failure out there, and someone to document it. People just barely hanging on to jobs, perhaps jobs they don't really care for but need. I guess that is what I am here to do, represent the undistinguished Philistines in the middle-class. Obviously, I will never be confused with anything more highbrow than Cousin Eddie. But count on me pretty much always writing in English.

Kid Stuff

So we all were eating dinner last night, a big one for Katie's birthday, when Steve, a 4-year-old, announces with a concerned look on his face, "I have to go pee!"

His mom said, "Well, go ahead and go," as he was getting up to leave.

His five-year-old brother Robbie said, "Stevie, you should say 'I have to go to the bathroom.'"

Steve made no comment. I am unsure if this suggestion will make him any more refined as a person, as he generally has disdain for any kind of correction made to his behavior or his life whatsoever. Even stranger is the extent to which Robbie has become so polite. I am stunned! I had no idea he was that genteel because up until now one his greatest joys is to fart while sitting on your lap.

Now I will have to take my own game up a notch, just to keep from being embarrassed.

In like a lion, out like a -- lion.

Today has been a little like November or December. They have been forecasting snow for a week. It has been overcast, cold and windy, On the radio, announcers are using the words "Winter Strom Warning." Denver has been on its knees because of a snowstorm which is now bearing down slowly on us here in Kansas City.

Usually the amount of hype is inversely proportional to the amount of snow, and the week-long drumbeat has been for somewhere between none and twelve inches. By now it should all be about Spring, the first cutting of grass, planting things, fertilizer, etc., and here we are still dealing with snow, ice, sandbags in the truck and the ineffable "wintry mix" that the weather bureau calls frozen rain and sleet, perhaps in an effort to make it seem more civilized. (It does not.)

The good news is that after we get the six inches planned for tomorrow (Saturday), it will warm into the 50's on Sunday. Go figure. Anyway, it still seems tonight as though winter were just starting and we should be planning for Thanksgiving. Just eight more month and we will be.

By the way, tomorrow in Miami it will be 90 degrees.

Utter Incompetence

The Kansas City, Missouri, City Council majestically passed their budget last night as the deadline for doing so rapidly closed in. Ignoring recommendations from both their adversary, the mayor, and their fair-haired city manager they cut the police department's budget by 12 million dollars.

Lord knows Mayor Funkhauser has made his share of mistakes, but they usually have been fouls away from the ball, most having to do with the antics of his wife. He otherwise is knowledgeable and competent about the city in stark contrast with the bulk of the Council. Many Councilmen / women seem to lack any real-world experience. Incredible, given that KC is--depending on which poll you care to cite--the 18th most dangerous city in the country. Regardless of what else may be happening here, with crime that significant does it really make sense to cut the police budget? Another poll, faithful readers will recall, recently ranked KC as the 46th-least desirable city out of 50 to which people living elsewhere might choose to move.

The mayor and City Manager Wayne Cauthen are not exactly close friends. They don't 'complement' each other. But even Mr. Cauthen seems to feel the Council reduced the police budget too severely. Always on the fence, he won't say so himself but allowed his 'Chief of Staff' to express that thought to the Mayor last night. (And does anyone besides me doubt the city manager needs a chief of staff? There is a city job ripe for the scrap heap. Teach Mr. Cauthen to use Outlook. He already has Assistant City Managers. Chief of Staff? Get real.)

So in this time of murders, theft, assaults, property crimes and infestation of drugs and drug gangs the Council not only will not maintain the police budget but gouges it deeply. In doing so they proudly are able to avoid reducing codes administration inspectors and maintain cutting weeds for property owners who should be cutting their own damned weeds anyway. Our elected representatives in the high crime districts should go outside once in a while and hear the gun shots. They should drop by the ER at Truman Medical Center at 2:00 on a Saturday morning. Maybe they should ride along with a cop and see if they really should be reducing police funds.

Now the Council claims that even with these reductions the police won't have to change the number of cops on the streets. ("Oh, " they say. "We are just looking to reduce the civilian staff at the Police Headquarters. It won't affect the patrols.") The Chief of Police isn't so sure. With neighborhood 'activists' as our elected representatives we seem to lack the common sense approach to governing that a printer, an auto worker or a business owner (someone with a real job) might bring to the table. Why put the Chief in that position? Give him the tools for which he asks. This isn't a little crime-free town in the Nebraska panhandle. This is an urban drug center with the turf wars, gang violence and creeping street crime to prove it. New York City is safer by the numbers.

Sorry, but we have a dreadful city council. Their chief accomplishments have been the abolition of smoking almost anywhere in the city and the banishment of the mayor's wife from city hall. (There's a record to run on next election.) Now add to that a public goring of the police department. They skipped an entire week of city business so they all could go to the Democratic National Convention in Denver last summer. They don't seem to get that the citizens here want to feel safe in their homes and don't mind moving to Johnson County to do so. With every move the tax base takes a hit, and in KC south of the river, there is block after block of virtually worthless property with microscopic tax value. Left behind in part because no one felt safe living there. So definitely cut the budget for law enforcement.

One of our little whiney-assed 'activist' council-persons must have got a traffic ticket one time; maybe the officer was uncompromisingly firm about it. So now we are stuck with city fathers who have the old 'flower child' mentality. "Let's just be nice to each other!" So you be nice to the nine-year-old with the AK-47 who is stealing your car.

Maybe the City Council can get the Democrats to hold the convention here in 2012. By then, if the Council has its way, we will have just six or eight cops left. The Bloods and Crips and MS-13 will provide contract security and direct traffic. They may be running the City Council by then as well.

Oh Give Me a Home...

After looking around at some of the other blogs, I feel really inadequate. There are people writing these things that discuss current events, their successful careers, detailed home decorating and deep philosophical topics. Some blogs concern puzzles, challenges or maybe very exacting hobbies. Deeper still, some are penned by disabled people who share that perspective on life.

I, in turn, write about trains and the weather.

So in this humble moment, I submit a few observations on the state of our country.

I have to agree, this is not a "run of the mill recession," as the President recently said. The failure of the credit sector distinguishes it from the '70's recession and those before. But the President, unchallenged by a friendly press, continues to mislead an uniformed public that this is all somehow a product of Republican mismanagement and Wall Street greed. He continues to stress that he didn't cause this mess; he is simply the one who has to clean it up.

Wait a minute.

There is, as the pundits say, plenty of blame to go around. Usually the press and Obama administration lackeys spread it around as far as, again, Republicans and Wall Street. Well, Wall Street certainly is culpable. Some of the firms there looked the other way as they bundled up packages of loans so toxic that they glowed in the dark. They were not totally ignorant of the mounting crisis-to-come. And as President Clinton said last fall, Republicans in the last Congress were negligent for failure to protest more loudly and longer what had become obvious blundering of the government's role in private lending through Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.

But what about the Democrats? Were they just victims of all this greed and mismanagement, utterly shocked like the rest of us when the housing market crashed? Were they the voices of reason and alarm in 2005, '06, and '07? I don't think so. Although given a free ride by the press--and thus absolved by the great unwashed, who obsequiously swept a load of Democrats into office in November--I think the truth would reveal they shouldn't have been stunned because they and their policies over the last ten years didn't contribute to the crash. They caused it.

Fannie, Freddy and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 are all creatures of the past Democratic administrations. Fannie and Freddy, both government agencies designed to make home loans available to a variety of Americans, are administered largely by President Clinton staffers. Under Clinton sponsorship, the CRA was used to justify forcing individual private banks, through various methods, to make shaky home loans at low interest--often with little or no down payment--to those who could least afford them. Having created this atmosphere of "loan to the little, poor guy or else" Congress congratulated itself for doing good, for getting the hard-working poor man into a home of his own and living the American Dream. But the ball kept rolling and the loans kept going out to people who were buying up beyond their means. As usual, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

As the demand for homes became greater with the government meddling in the home loan industry, home prices escalated far beyond what the market could eventually bear. It was particularly bad in California, Nevada and other rapidly growing parts of the USA.

One of the few voices to warn of the impending disaster was one George W. Bush, who in 2003 and again in 2005, called for Congress to oversee more closely what Fannie and Freddy were doing to the housing industry and credit market. Democrats in Congress (read, "Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.) blocked any action on supervision of what Congress was allowing to occur. The press--by now routinely dismissing the President as a buffoon--granted him no coverage or magnification of his warnings. The stage was set for disaster.

Once the housing and credit sectors failed and the layoffs began last year, banks just froze up. Each bank now had no idea of what the other was worth becasue so many banks had bad loans out--now in the hundreds of thousands across the country. As banks refused to make loans to anyone, business began to contract, layoffs mounted, car sales tanked and here we are in a recession. No one can say we would not have had this recession without the credit failure--it might have happened anyway--but we might not have had one as deep, or perhaps at all.

My point in this very condensed description of our situation is that we can't buy what Obama, Dodd, Frank, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, NBC, CBS, ABC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and every two-bit state and local politician are selling. We don't dare. Wall Street is guilty, yes. The Republicans, who rarely raise their voices even to defend themselves, should have loudly protested what they saw happening. But the Democrats are standing by indignantly criticizing everyone else, as if they were just casual observers of what went on in the last few months and years. I believe that they are actually stunned by what happened but I also believe that the truth is they caused much of what happened.

Don't buy into their professed role as the homeowner who returns home to find the house rifled, drawers emptied on the floor and furniture overturned, with all the jewelry stolen. They aren't victims any more than the rest of us. Their fingerprints are all over this recession, this credit crisis and the housing debacle. Democrats are quite guilty. "But," they say, "we had to try to make home ownership available to everyone. It's the American Dream, and everyone has a right to it." We may be all equal in rights, and under the law, but that is all the Congress needs to assure. The American Dream of owning a home isn't for everyone and the government sure doesn't need to try to hand it out. Ask yourself what has the government ever done so efficiently that it has proven itself to qualify now as a mortgage banker?

Everyone has a right to dream, that's true. But The Dream has to come from hard work, and sacrifice, and good citizenship. The opportunity is there for all, and the dream is there for those who go work for it. Just don't get suckered in to thinking that liberal Democrats didn't have a huge role in this, as they manipulated the CRA ultimately to buy votes from the folks they unwittingly installed in homes that were wrong for them at the wrong time.

This information is all out there. Thomas Jefferson knew that only through an informed electorate would this government be successful. So, come on, America. Look beyond the "mainstream press" and get some other perspectives on how you have been deceived. It is not too late. And you have been deceived.

My way, take the highway that's the best.

Old US 66, westbound at Hooker's Cut, Missouri, Sept. 2007

I don't have a car. I have a truck, a 2002 Ford F-150. Before this one I had two other trucks, both Ford Rangers; a '98 with air conditioning and my first truck, a '94 without. They both were 4-cylinder powered and got very good gas mileage. The F-150 has a bigger engine, a big V-6, which probably gets about the same mileage a small V-8 would. So the gas consumption is a little disappointing but I have had 7 years to get used to it.

So in spite of the mileage, a couple of times a year I get in the truck and head off down a highway in search of old railway depots to photograph, or to revisit places I have not seen since childhood. It is just therapeutic to get out and see some of the country from time to time. One thing I would love to do has little in common with the other topics I have discussed in this blog--I'd love to take the old truck up to Chicago and drive out to California as much as possible on old original Route 66.

It is still out there, a lot of it. It exists as state highways, city streets, county roads and farm-to-market routes. I know this, I have been on a lot of it in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Sadly in some places it exists only as grass-covered rights of way, or just faint memories. Still, most of it is there in fact if not in name. Route 66, the fabled highway from Chicago's lake front to the Santa Monica Pier, was truncated some on both ends in the '70's and finally decommissioned altogether in 1984. Much of the original road was bypassed by the Interstates. The businesses along the route suffered greatly as each new segment of 4-lane opened, withering and dying, sadly, because they were family-owned restaurants, service stations and motels. Each had it's own local flair and personality, keeping individuals employed and involved in the community. Travellers began to value conformity, or at least they sure settled for it. Identical fast-food outlets and boxy little motels with inside hallways popped up everywhere having little to distinguish them from each other.

What I like to see is what remains. So sometime I think it would be a kick to drive as much of the old road as possible, beginning to end. It is fun to look at an old restaurant or abandoned gas station on a run-down street, identify how they fit in with adjacent establishments and picture in your mind's eye how busy it all must have been in 1956. Sometimes you look at a strip mall and it hits you, "Hey, that is an old motel," and you realize you're driving what once was the life line of a community. Just a little detective work reveals the vitality that 66 meant in a burg. Before the Interstates, highways took you through the heart of a city or town. You saw the city hall, the county courthouse, the best cafe they had, their banks and homes, and stopped at their stop lights (an irritant which probably popularized the interstates). Then, back at home, you could really say, "Amarillo is actually a nice town," or "Gallup has a beautiful city park," because you had if fact been there and seen for yourself. Now you only see the exit signs and the McDonald's and the Holiday Inn Express unless you make it a point to go a little deeper and visit what's left.

Old 66 follows railway lines across the country: the Illinois Central between Chicago and St. Louis, the Frisco on west to Oklahoma City, the Rock Island from Oklahoma City to Santa Rosa, then after a short gap to Albuquerque, the Santa Fe all the way to Los Angeles. That last part was a fun part. I have been on a lot of it in New Mexico and Arizona; we passed through when I was 13 and probably drove my Dad nuts wanting to stop in every town to watch a train go by at the local depot.

And there were signs out there--posted mile after mile in advance--that proclaimed the "last gas before the desert" at Whiting Brothers stations. After passing one, the next "last gas" outlet would be instantly touted by the next chain of signs, this in force all the way across the desert. There never really was any "last gas," just last gas signs and a wealth of gas stations.

A small economy based on "Trading Posts" also existed on US66 in those same two states. They advertised hundreds of miles in advance, touting buck knives, moccasins, curios, postcards, cold drinks and Indian souvenirs. They were interesting places crowded with Virginians and Ohioans who found themselves face-to-face with the Old West, marveling at caged rattlesnakes and rubber daggers. I can remember kids occasionally browsing in their pajamas, attesting to the high-speed, long-riding "gotta make time" attitude of their parents. They'd cast quick glances at the cash register to see if Dad was ready reload the car lest they get left behind. I wonder how many of them wet their pants or had to pee out the window because the old man wanted to make 600 miles that day. Pure Route 66.

Good restaurants, all one-of-a-kind owner-operated, were in every town. They were usually open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but not often 24 hour places unless signed as truck stops. Most had a counter with stools backed by an endless row of stainless-steel milk dispensers, refrigerators full of cream pies viewed by me through their sliding glass doors, giant coffee makers, Hamilton-Beach malt mixers, racks of individual cereal boxes, and sometimes a grill with a big exhaust hood. There would be booths and tables for four, often as not with linen tablecloths. Many places had all of this in the front and a second dining room in the rear, or next door. The extra room was usually just open in the evenings. Some owners hired an organist or piano player, even in small towns. And the food was always good. Not as many choices as you might have today, but always first rate. Fried chicken, steaks, fried shrimp, halibut, chef salads and roast beef were standard fare. Motel owners and filling station attendants would never steer you to a hash house. They wanted your business when you came through the next time. Nothing--except maybe an orange grove--ever smelled better than the aroma of breakfast in those eateries as you entered from the dim coolness of an early morning. Bacon, toast, coffee, maple syrup--that all gives off a comforting smell. When you went back out to the car after a nice breakfast, the sun was up, warm on your face and you were ready to travel.

Route 66 had good owner-managed motels for travelling families, and did land-office business during the summer months. I liked to walk through the parking lot and see where the license plates - and the cars attached to them - were from. Usually you would get a very diverse sampling of America. Usually the pool was busy on a hot afternoon. Usually the grass on the lawns was cool on bare feet and very green, even in Winslow, Arizona or Tucumcari, New Mexico. Usually we found clean rooms with crisp clean sheets on the beds. Usually you could park right in front of the door to your room. Usually strangers easily struck up conversations as they loaded their cars in the mornings, willing to inform each other how far they might get that day or what they hoped to see. Times were a little different then.

None of this was exclusive to 66; just typical of it.

I know you can't go home again. I would still like to go find the old route through the small towns and cities that so many of us used in the years when 66 was Main Street for the Southwest. I'd like to see what became of the attractions along the road: Yellowhorse Trading Post, Twin Arrows, the Cozy Dog, the Blue Swallow Motel and others. I know some are gone outright. But Route 66 has tried to mount a comeback in recent years, trading on its history and nostalgia. Many come from Europe to explore the old road, and there are books galore and a magazine all about it. It has experienced a rebirth and there is a even a grass-roots movement to recertify old 66. She will never again be the romantic "Mother Road" which carried so many Dust Bowl-ers from Oklahoma and Kansas to work in California, and eventually back to the Midwest. It's no longer a through highway built for speed. Still, it retains its heritage, song, architecture and some day I hope to go check it out. And get a piece of that pie.

Changing of the Guard

Wow, I have been lazy. I haven't posted a blog in over a week. I had kinda-sorta resolved to at least put up one entry a week if not more, but this was my wife's "Annual Appeal" week at work. During that early March week I am usually enlisted to help stuff envelopes, record pledges and assist with the mailing. She is a fund-raiser, and they need all the help they can get. Thus I have had to use my blog time to turn the wheels of charity.

We had the time change a week ago. It has always been a milestone in the year, along with Annual Appeal time. The days are getting longer anyway but with Daylight Time once again in force, the extra light in the afternoon is welcome. It signals the switch from winter to summer, dark to light, cold to warm, even though it is still obviously winter, pretty much dark and often cold. Twilight at 7:00 PM is just a reminder that the climate soon will be much more forgiving if I am patient.

When I was little, I remember seeing the crocus shoots pushing up through the cold March soil, frequently covered with a thin layer of snow. That was a sign that things were going to start happening, because shortly after the tulips would begin to grow as well. As the frosts fell away in a rapid succession of weakening winter days, my dad's petunias, pansys and roses would begin to make their colorful appearances in his flower bed below our front porch. That was a hundred or so miles south of here where the climate is not different in a dramatic way, but March is the moment when life seems to renew. Here in northern Missouri, there are some warm days and the wonderful twilight even beyond the dinner hour. Even so Spring will start in earnest next month.

With all of this comes the lack of necessity for a heavy jacket and the real necessity of mowing the lawn. And also along with this is the dreaded tornado season; that time of year which has single-handedly caused New Yorkers and Californians alike to wonder what in the world would tempt rational human beings to live in this belt of torn trees, homes without roofs, hail, and those ominous break-in television bulletins warning of impending doom. They look at us and ask how we can stand living with that kind of implied violence just as we wonder how they can live anticipating earthquakes and terrorist attacks.

Those of us from Kansas recognize Tornado Season as a kind of fifth season separate from the other four. It is one part horror movie, one part science and two parts wild imagination. Spring days are warm, sunny days with a healthy singing of birds. Tornado season days are hot humid affairs with towering thunderheads blotting out the sun, changing from cotton-white to a sick greenish-black. Nothing can chill your blood on those afternoons like a chorus of sirens rising all over town to alert you to a storm lurking unseen in the distance with a hungry eye on your house. Especially after you have already witnessed the unthinkable done to your fellow citizens.

It is part of the arrangement we have around here. Occasionally a high price will be paid by some. You just try not to imagine that it will ever be you, your family, your home that is called on to write that check.

The hard cold armor of winter now has a chink which we all can see. In the days ahead the nights will be less frosty and the days will cast that welcome warmth on our faces. People will appear wearing shorts and T-shirts at the earliest possibility, only to have to wear jeans and a heavy coat the next day. But yes, my friends, we have turned a corner.

Wichita County

The picture at the top of the page, if you are interested, was taken on October 1, 2008, at approximately one PM. The location is near the Logan/Wichita county line, in western Kansas. So much western that in 30 more miles you are in eastern Colorado.

You are looking west-southwest, from the shoulder of highway K-25. I stopped to take this picture on the Oakley-Leoti leg of my most recent photo-journey which looped through this part of the state. There are no towns nearby. Oakley and I-70 are 25 or 30 miles behind. Leoti, the seat of Wichita County, is 15 another fifteen miles in the distance. The emptiness is broken only by Russell Springs, the abandoned Logan County seat which is almost a ghost town. A few die-hard residents remain; the county maintains shops, and there is damned little else.

Several ranchers around here have homes close enough to the highway that you can see them, countable on just one hand. Even glimpsing a full-growth tree is an event. It was a nice day, however, and I liked this view; the line of trees in the distance forming the windbreak, and the vast blue sky--so I digitalized it for immortality. Maybe someone's home is engulfed by that vegetation, it's hard to say with certainty. What appears to be an old road, or maybe someone's private landing strip, trails away from the roadside.

Not visible here but just to the right, out of the frame, are "breaks" where the underlying sandstone has been uncovered. Looking barren to the untrained eye, under this grassland is a magnificent aquifer stretching from the Dakotas to Texas. From it water is pumped for homes, for irrigation and for livestock giving life to what Zebulon Pike called the "Great American Desert."

Folks who call this lonesome part of the state home are the ones who grow our wheat and raise our beef. Far from being isolated bumpkins, they are savvy businessmen and -women running multi-million dollar operations. Where there is a town, it is often neat, clean, and prosperous. Private aircraft are more of a necessity than luxury to many people here.

The sky and landscape are empty on this warm, early autumn afternoon but don't make the mistake of thinking there is nothing "out there" and that only loners and simpletons can be found west of Overland Park. Or New York, for that matter.

Good day.

Paul Harvey is dead. I have lost a friend.

I never met or even saw Paul Harvey, never shook his hand or wrote him a letter. But he was part of my day--six days a week--for years, since I was eleven. Over those years I came to feel he was one of the family.

I always thought he was talking right to me. He delivered the news with common sense in plain language; conservative and no nonsense but not confrontational. And not without humor or a personal touch. It was the delivery itself that set him apart, with staccato bursts of his sentences, dramatic pauses and vocal inflections. (HELLO Americans! This is Paul Harvey. Stand by for NEWS!) He was one of a kind. You heard each carefully chosen word clearly and distinctly. No one else could do it. No one else tried.

In the summer of 1962, KAKE radio in Wichita began to advertise on its sister TV station that they would be an ABC radio affiliate on August 1st. They extolled the benefits of ABC network news, a program with a lot of tradition called Don McNeill's Breakfast Club, and Paul Harvey news. My old 1958 Philco clock radio was set on KAKE (AM, of course, because in those days only universities operated low-powered FM stations with classical music and boring academic discussions on philosophy) so for the remainder of my summer I was waking up to "Paul Harvey News and Comment."

The bond was immediate. Mr. Harvey, a staple in Chicago since 1951, read news headlines but for the first time I heard commentary along with it. And I liked it. His crisp voice, with that remarkable delivery, captured my imagination. His first daily broadcast was at 7:55, just before the regular news at eight, Monday through Friday. He had an expanded fifteen-minute report at 12:05 which ran Saturdays as well. I listened to those broadcasts from then until just a few years ago when WDAF no longer aired Paul Harvey in Kansas City. My family never missed an opportunity to tease me about religiously trying to tune in, especially on vacation, but I noticed they listened too.

As I said, Paul Harvey took a conservative, common sense approach, much like my dad. Perhaps that was a contributing factor to the bond. I heard his displeasure when criminals were set free on technicalities or when politicians misbehaved. I heard him cheer and felt his happiness when the USA achieved a victory in the Cold War, in the Olympics, in Congress, in the world arena. There was never a doubt of his love of country in contrast with so many celebrities, news makers and even newsreaders of today who are often competing to be the first in line to find fault with the United States on any subject, as publicly as possible. I think he personally mourned each soldier who died in Viet Nam and each victim of a cold-blooded murder about which he reported.

Paul Harvey also had a little fun with us. He solicited the names of and identified couples all across the country as "champion lovers" who had been married the longest, occasionally finding people with 70-plus years "on their way to together forever." He would read a story in which some publicity-seeking scoundrel had behaved outrageously, often criminally, and then state: "Of course, he would want us to mention his name." There would be a pause, then he would move on to the next story with at least one news outlet denying a fool his reward. And he had special broadcasts for special days. Every year, on Saturdays before Easter, Father's Day and Independence Day, I made it a point to hear his radio essays on those subjects. They were simple but he so filled them with the essence of the day that each was very moving. I have missed them and will continue to do so. They should be heard by every American every year.

Being in Chicago, Paul often would begin a Saturday piece with "This is Chicago..." and paint a word picture of the state of Chicago urban politics, a city of rich heritage--if not tainted with incredible scandal and corruption. He would take Mayor Daley to task, or the council, or Chicagoans themselves. But he had a great love for his adopted hometown which I could feel six hundred miles away in his words. I shared it, because Chicago was the foremost rail hub in the nation, the city where my beloved Santa Fe trains began and ended their runs. And I shared it more because Chicago is the unofficial capital of the Midwest, my part of the country. It was as though Paul Harvey stood atop the Prudential Building on Michigan Avenue, with his booming voice heard all across Chicago, across Illinois and Iowa prairie farmland to the southwest, across the golden wheat, cattle and oil country where I lived and deep into Oklahoma and Texas.

But of course he spoke not just to us here in the Midwest but to all Americans. Paul Harvey always supported the efforts and sacrifices of the US military, and his reports aired on the overseas Armed Forces Radio network as well. Even after he came to oppose the Viet Nam war he never failed to praise the men and women who were in it, and he never failed to remember our veterans.

Paul Harvey wasn't perfect; he probably stayed on the air too long. His memory confounded him in later years. On one live broadcast I remember a painful pause as he struggled to remember the name of a product as he live-read one of his commercial endorsements. He was slightly of the opinion that women should be kept on pedestals; his notions of what was "lady-like" failed to keep pace with changing culture. He attempted to start a traditional children's broadcast on Christmas Eve, interviewing Santa at the North Pole as he prepared to start his annual trip delivering toys, but it never captured a wide audience or long run.

He always described himself as a "professional parade watcher," letting us know his passion for getting up at 3:30 AM at his home in River Forest and hurrying to the studio in downtown Chicago to get the news of the day together. I don't think he could have retired. How great it must be to enjoy one's work that much. His work was rivaled only by his love of his wife, "Angel," who died last May. Somehow I just knew after that, Paul wasn't far behind.

So good-bye for now, Paul Harvey. I hope we meet up again in the great beyond. I would like to tell you how I loved to hear you, and I want you to know how you helped me form opinions and see things for what they are. Until then, old friend, Good Day!