Smooth Operator

Nah, this post doesn't have much relevance to Sade's 1985 single detailing the life of a cold-hearted, jet-set gigolo nor removing noise from data. So if a search engine brought you to this remote corner of the Web by error ...

"No place for beginners or sensitive hearts When sentiment is left to chance. No place to be ending but somewhere to start."

Europe between 1938 and 1945 was no place for beginners or sensitive hearts, so Winston Churchill tasked "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare," or the Special Operations Executive (SOE), to pry it back from the Third Reich. The average life expectancy of SOE agents serving in occupied territory was six weeks despite their extensive training.

Etienne and Violette Szabó during their honeymoon

Some SOE agents were particularly ungentlemanly--they were women. Section F of the SOE employed 39 female agents in occupied France. Thirteen never returned. Of those, Violette Szabó, who volunteered as an agent after her husband Etienne was killed at El Alamein, is most likely the best known. Szabó, the second woman to receive the George Cross, was beaten, raped, starved, and eventually executed and cremated at the Ravensbrück concentration camp with three other female SOE agents shortly before it was liberated by Allied forces.

If you're like me, avoiding the noise about important issues of the day such as a universal health care "right" that "the rich" are going to pay for, there's relief and lessons to learn from history. Then, rather than working and paying taxes, one can take solace in some Violette Szabó-inspired movies, books and even a video game, Violet Assassin.

I don't think Gervase Cowell, an ex-MI6 officer and British Special Forces Club historian, had Violet Assassin or morphine in mind when he told Queen Elizabeth II, "I help the old to remember and the young to understand."

Flint knapping anyone?

A note from one of the distributors I use for reloading components:

At this time we are not taking any new backorders for primers that are not listed here. We currently have over 50 million primers on backorder. If you currently have a backorder in place your order will be processed as primers become available. Once we begin receiving more primers from the manufacturers and are able to begin filling current backorders we will update the website.

English-type musket flint found in Lyon Co., Kansas

There seems to be a fair supply of #10 and #11 percussion caps. Maybe it's time to pick up a new brace of cap and ball revolvers. Then there's always flintlocks--no flint shortages in Kansas. Oddly enough, I don't have a .22 LR revolver. I've spotted a Colt Official Police so chambered with a 6-inch barrel and some pearl Jay-Scott-Ajax-looking grips.

Yes, I'll remove the pearlies if that Colt finds its way home with me.

Three of Quantrill's men--no pearl handles on their fighting irons.

Happy May Day!

There's all sorts of reasons--green and red--to party hearty today. Decorate and distribute May Day baskets, wash and wax the T-55s and Scud missiles, boycott or strike, and do a little maypole dancing.

Lay down your burdens, procreate and join the parade.

Happy St. Pat's Day!

Cead Mile Failte to all the Irish out there who happen to stumble by this post.

My great-great-great-great grandfather came to New World shores from Argyll in western Scotland, once part of the ancient Gaelic Kingdom of Dalriada. The Scoti, from present-day Northern Ireland, spread across the North Channel, or Sruth na Maoile, and warred with the Picts for nearly three centuries. The Scoti and the Picts fused into the Kingdom of Alba under Kenneth I in 843. My clan descends from Kenneth I and ninth-century Viking interlopers, the dark strangers.

I'm wearing green in honor of my cousins. May you all have a lovely day. I'll think of you as I watch the spring grass grow. EZ, a two-year-old gelding, is straining to reach every bit of the new grass from inside his pipe-fenced prison. I'm going to let him out a bit to have at it.

"Boondoggle"

I was checking out the Foundation for Economic Education blog Sunday during Bridgestone Super Bowl XLIII and discovered the etymology of "boondoggle".

The word took on another dimension following an April 4, 1935, New York Times article, “$3,187,000 Relief is Spent to Teach Jobless to Play ... Boon Doggles Made”. A New Deal government stimulus program changed that word's meaning to:

boon·dog·gle, n (plural boon·dog·gles) (informal)

1. insignificant pursuit: an activity or project that is trivial and wasteful of time or money
2. politically motivated government project: a government project of little practical value funded to gain political favor

vi (past boon·dog·gled, past participle boon·dog·gled, present participle boon·dog·gling, 3rd person present singular boon·dog·gles) (informal)

1. do something impractical: to do something unimportant or impractical
2. deceive or mislead somebody: to deceive or attempt to deceive somebody

[Mid-20th century. Coined by the U.S. scoutmaster R. H. Link for a braided leather cord made by Scouts.]

Microsoft® Encarta® Reference Library 2004. © 1993-2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Anyone for boondoggles?

"a date which will live in infamy"

The president-elect, Barack Obama, revealed his plans for a new "New Deal" last weekend. It is appropriate to remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the first deal on Pearl Harbor Day.

Roosevelt's "date which will live in infamy" announcement after Japan's, Dec. 7, 1941, attacks in the Pacific is remembered as one of the most famous political speeches in our country's history. The New Deal and Roosevelt's handling of World War II is legendary. FDR is ranked as one of the most popular presidents ever.

Most overlook or do not know about Executive Order 6102, where Roosevelt declared all privately-held gold property of the government, and Executive Order 9066, which imprisoned Japanese Americans without due process in February 1942. When judges ruled against his policies, FDR replaced them with rubber stampers.

George Santayana reminds us, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." There's no doubt that surrendering the reins of government to one man in 2009 is a mistake, despite how the 21st Century-equivalent of Roosevelt's "Brain Trust" tell us it is necessary.

Check out Richard Olivastros's column, Infamous Day of "East Wind, Rain". It's one more example of how one of our most revered chief executives disregarded constitutional safeguards. FDR was only one man, not a demigod or a king. If presidents are allowed to operate outside the restraints laid out by the U.S. Constitution in times of real or drummed-up emergencies, we're less free thereafter. FDR has been a model for too long. It's time to change back to the Constitution.

Standing in the Gap

This is the f'irst Veteran's Day I've spent without my father. He served in the U.S. Army from 1951 to 1953.

An electrician with Flour Corporation and one-month veteran of marriage to Mom, Dad figured he would wind up in Korea. The Army put him in the Signal Corps and sent him to West Germany. He was one out of hundreds of thousands of Cold Warriors who, from 1945 to 1994, waited near the Fulda Gap and the North German Plain, the most-logical routes of a Soviet invasion that never took place. Then there were the thousands of Army and Air Force personnel who served in encircled West Berlin.

My friend, Chris, served in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, in Vietnam and in Germany. The Blackhorse was based in Germany three times: 1944-1948, 1956-1966, and 1972-1994. During the last period, its headquarters was at Downs Barracks in Fulda, where this Blackhorse memorial remains.

On this Veteran's Day, we shouldn't forget those who quietly stand in the gap: Marines at U.S. embassies, Coast Guard boarding teams, flight crews of Air Force refueling tankers, the men and women buried deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, the crews of Aegis guided missle destroyers and subs, the members of reserve units, those along an remote, fortified border with North Korea, and countless others past, present and future.

A scrap of an old poem, "Pop"

Pop takes another shot, neat,

Points out the same amber

Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine, and

Makes me smell his smell, coming

From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem

He wrote before his mother died,

Stands, shouts, and asks

For a hug, as I shrink, my

Arms barely reaching around

His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; ’cause

I see my face, framed within

Pop’s black-framed glasses

And know he’s laughing too.

Barry Obama, 1981

A 44-year-old message

Here's an excerpt from a Nov. 6, 1964, TIME article detailing the last days of Sen. Barry M. Goldwater's campaign to replace Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House.

Said he to the Madison Square Garden throng: "It is a fact that Lyndon Johnson and his curious crew seem to believe that progress in this country is best served simply and directly through the ever-expanding gift power of the everlastingly growing Federal Government. One thing we all know, and I assure you I do: that's a much easier way to get votes than my way. It always has been. It's political Daddyism, and it's as old as demagogues and despotism."

Johnson was re-elected in a landslide. Democrats gained enough seats to control more than two-thirds of each chamber in the Congress with a 68-32 Senate margin and a 295-140 margin in the House of Representatives. The Federal Government grew at a rate not seen since the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal." The core of LBJ's "Great Society" and "War on Poverty" agendas were passed by Congress in the two years preceding Goldwater's defeat. The Johnson Administration submitted 87 bills to Congress, of which Johnson gladly signed 84.

Now 44 years later, we have an opportunity to elect another political Daddy and a Congress eager to cooperate. How is this change we can believe in when it failed to work 44 years ago?

Sweet Home Chicago

This 12-bar blues standard, which is credited to the legendary Mississippi Delta musician Robert Leroy Johnson by some, is an unofficial Chicago anthem. The Democrats also played it a lot during their 1996 national convention. It has been covered by at least 500 artists including Johnny Otis, Muddy Waters, Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, Roosevelt "Honeydripper" Sykes and Earl Hooker.

Mr. Johnson never visited Chicago, it is believed. His lyrics differed from the better-known version. The Honeydripper was the first one to record Sweet Home Chicago using the lyrics used in the Blues Brothers cover.

Others claim Johnson borrowed the song from a part-Cherokee blues guitarist, Scrapper Blackwell. Scrapper, who grew up and spent most of his life in Indianapolis, did travel to Chicago and the "level light city", Kokomo, Ind. He recorded Kokomo Blues in the 1928 for Vocation Records. Johnson's version that changed the city to Chicago was also recorded for Vocation nine years later.

Now, Johnson was the guy who was rumored to have sold his soul to the Devil at a Mississippi crossroad. He gets the credit for writing Sweet Home Chicago. The legend died at another Mississippi crossroad in August 1938, possibly from drinking strychnine-laced whiskey.

Blackwell lived on until October 1962 when he was shot and killed during an Indianapolis alley mugging.

Happy Columbus Day!

Or El Día de la Resistencia Indígena for those in Caracas wearing their freshly pressed red shirts.

For those of like mind in other parts of the world, I give you Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer" so that you may remember this somber day of oppression from which all sorts of evil has resulted such as electricity, the digital age, recreational drugs, and banks of amps and speakers that have damaged Neil's hearing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qmMyyo5djw

Exploding Yard Darts

I first encountered yard darts during a week spent south of Bozeman, MT. The people who managed the cabins had a set. After the kids nearly nailed a dog, they were put away.

Anyhow, the Civil War-era Ketchum hand grenades somewhat resemble yard darts. They were made in three sizes: one, three and five pounds. The Union purchased more than 92,000. The egg-shaped cast iron bodies were charged with powder. The tapered wood with three fins attached was inserted in the rear of the body to hold the powder in place. Then a primer was inserted into the nose followed by a plunger with a two-inch wide head. This picture shows the one-pound version.

The grenades were patented during the summer of 1861 by William F. Ketchum of Buffalo, NY. He was primarily known for his farm implement innovations. He was the first to offer a practical hay mowing machine, which hit the market in the mid 1840s.

Ketchum grenades were used during assaults on Confederate earthworks at Port Hudson, Louisana, in 1863. The defenders spread out blankets to catch the grenades so they wouldn't detonate. Then the Confederates would fling them back down into the attackers.

The grenades often failed to explode. Maybe plain yard darts would have worked better.

The WASP

This photograph caught my eye a few months ago. It spurred me to read more about women pilots in World War II. Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP, ferried 12,650 military aircraft between 1942 and December 1944. That was more than 50 percent of the total manufactured during the same time period.

The pilots above, from left to right, are: Frances Green Kari, Margaret Kircher Stevensen, Ann Waldner Currier and Blanche Osborne Bross. They were walking down the flight line at Lockbourne Army Air Base in Columbus, Ohio, where they were trained to fly B-17 Flying Fortresses. Mrs. Currier is the only one still living. Mrs. Kari died in 1994 of cancer in Boise, Idaho, I believe.

Thirty-eight WASP lost their lives. Although they were under the command of the Army Air Force, they were considered civil service employees and received no death benefits. This meant their families had to pay transport charges to have remains shipped home and all burial expenses.

The WASP were trained at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. Avenger Field is Sweetwater Airport. Hangar One, which was on the civilian side of Avenger Field during the war, is now home to the National WASP World War II Museum. The military side was located where the Texas State Technical College campus is now. On the campus, one will yet find the WASP wishing well. Next to it is a memorial wall.

Many of the pilots' letters, journals and photos featured the wishing well. The above photo is one of pilot Dede Deaton. It was a cool place to rest each evening after a full day of penetrating Texas sun. There, the pilots shared their fears and dreams with each other or quietly with the night.

He did not die in bed

Former Ford County, Kan., Sheriff Bat Masterson called his one-time undersheriff "the greatest of us all." And President Teodore Roosevelt said the old lawman would charge hell with a bucket of water. They were describing Bill Tilghman, one of Oklahoma's legendary "Three Guardsmen".

Tilghman, born in 1854, arrived in Kansas with his family two years later. By age 16, he was hunting bison in southwest Kansas. There he befriended Bat and Jim Masterson, the Earp brothers, and other hunters who later became peace officers in Dodge City, the "Queen of the Cowtowns". He served as an Army scout, operated a saloon, and was a rancher after the bison herds vanished.

Bat Masterson appointed Tilghman as a Ford County, Kan., deputy sheriff in 1877, where he served until 1884 when he became Dodge City's marshal. He also served as a lawman during the "County Seat Wars" in western Kansas.

In the 1889 Sooner land rush, Tilghman moved his family to Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory. He served as a lawman in both Guthrie and Perry. U.S. Marshal Ed Nix offered him an appointment as a federal officer. Tilghman and fellow U.S. deputy marshals Chris Madson and Heck Thomas were assigned the task of hunting down the Dalton-Doolin gang. The citizens of Coffeyville, Kan., ended the career of the Daltons. The Three Guardsmen killed or led posses that captured the remainder. Together they made more than 300 arrests.

The marshal settled in Chandler and was elected Lincoln County sheriff in 1900. Later, he served Lincoln County in the Oklahoma Legislature. He resigned to become Oklahoma City's first appointed police chief in July 1911. He immediately directed officers to shut down brothels, gambling and bootlegging operations.

At the end of the two-year term, Tilghman returned to Chandler and operated Champion Stock Farm. The operation centered around Tilghman's horse, Chant, a Kentucky Derby winner.

He also directed a movie, The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws, which was released in 1915 by Tilghman's Eagle Film Company. Disturbed by the unfavorable portrayals of lawmen and the casting of outlaws as heros in other movies, he enlisted Nix, Madsen, other lawmen and the last surviving member of the Dalton-Doolin gang to portray themselves. Tilghman also starred in the movie. Theater owners were reluctant to run it because it lacked stars. The legend traveled the country, showing the movie and speaking to crowds.


Tilghman never retired from law enforcement. Along with Madsen and a few others, he held a statewide, special deputy's commission that was renewed by each of Oklahoma's early governors. He was called to stem tribal "Crazy Snake" uprisings and thwart Klu Klux Klan activities. In the early 1920s, oil was discovered in Oklahoma. Lawless boom towns sprang up in the oil patch and the state suffered from an unrelenting crime wave. Governor M.E. Trapp requested Tilghman to serve as his special investigator.

A few fearful citizens of Cromwell, nearly 60 miles east of Oklahoma City in Seminole County, petitioned Trapp for help. After the discovery of oil in October 1923, Cromwell grew from nothing into a wide-open, lawless city of more than 5,000 people by the following spring. The city had recorded at least 10 unsolved murders. Its oil-soaked, wood-frame businesses were primarily illegal saloons, gambling halls, and brothels. A man named Killian was reputably Cromwell's representative for crime bosses in Oklahoma City. Illegal drug use and "White Lightning" consumption was rampant. A Federal Prohibition agent, Wiley Lynn, was suspected of being paid to look the other way. Trapp asked Tilghman to tame one more town, "the wickedest in all Oklahoma."

The lawman's second wife and children asked him to turn down the assignment. Tilghman, who had not told them or Trapp he was dying from cancer, went regardless. Tilghman told a friend he wanted to die with his boots on and "not in bed like an old woman." After six months as the marshal of "Wicked Cromwell", he had made considerable progress with no help from Seminole County authorities. Lynn also arranged to release some of Tilghman's arrestees behind the scenes.

Halloween night, 1924, the marshal was having coffee in Ma Murphy's cafe, still in operation despite Tilghman shutting down Ma's attached "dance hall", with his deputy Hugh Sawyer and businessman W.E. Sirmans. Sirmans was one of the citizens who had requested help from Gov. Trapp. At 10 p.m. the men heard a shot fired outside in the street. Tilghman, who had stopped wearing his heavy gunbelt and Colt Peacemaker because of his cancer pain, drew a Colt .32 automatic from his pocket and ran outside.

G. Wayne Tilman, a distant cousin of Marshal Tilghman, described what happened next in "The Long Trail that ended in Cromwell: the Life and Death of legendary lawman Bill Tilghman", a July 1999 Cowboy Sports article:

"A drunken Wiley Lynn stood there, gun in hand. Brothel madam Rose Lutke was standing next to him. Another known prostitute, Eva Caton was sitting in Lynn's car with her date, a furloughed army sergeant.

Tilghman clasped Lynn's gun hand while jamming his own automatic into Lynn's ribs. He yelled for Hugh Sawyer to disarm Lynn. Rose Lutke, Lynn and Tilghman stood body to body in the dark as the young deputy rushed towards them. Two shots rang out. Lutke started screaming. After a few seconds, Tilghman slumped against the wall. Lynn disarmed Sawyer, who had yelled "Wiley Lynn has shot the Marshal!" though he had been unable to actually see the incident.

Lynn and Lutke jumped in the car and sped off.

William Matthew Tilghman died twenty minutes later on a sofa in the used furniture store next to Ma Murphy's. He had been hit twice in the left lung and bled to death internally."

One month after his death, every "every flophouse, bar, pool hall and brothel" in Cromwell were torched. The homes were spared. The arsons were never investigated. It was rumored the buildings were leveled in retribution for Tilghman's death by his friends.

Tilghman's body laid in state at the Oklahoma State Capitol. Lynn lost his federal position but was acquitted by a jury under suspicious circumstances. Key witnesses such as Rose Lutke vanished. Sirmans fled to Florida after his life was threatened.

Lynn died in July 1932. He entered Madill's Corner Drug Store and pointed a handgun at Crockett Long, an Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agent. Lynn blamed Long for his failure to obtain a job with the state bureau. Long, who had served as Madill's chief of police, had also arrested Lynn in the past. Long turned, tried to get Lynn to put down his weapon, and then drew his .44 Smith and Wesson revolver. Both men shot each other. A bystander, 22-year-old Rody Watkins, was fatally struck in the spine by a bullet from Lynn's .38 Colt semi-auto pistol that had passed through Long's body.

Long died on the operating table a short time later. When Lynn heard Long had died, he said, "If he's dead, now I'm ready to die." Lynn folded his arms across his chest, and the killer of three men stopped breathing.

Upon hearing of Lynn's death and expressing regret for the deaths of Long and Watkins, Tilghman's widow, Zoe, said, "No jury on Earth can acquit him now."

Tilghman's grave can be found in Chandler's Oak Park Cemetery. His home, a private residence, is on the National Historic Register. Chandler celebrates Independence Day, his birthday, in Tilghman Park, which sits on land Tilghman once owned.

Cromwell is now a small town with less than 300 people. In years past, it has celebrated "Bill Tilghman Day" on the second Saturday in October.

Canyons and Caprock

One night I explored an unknown place. I sensed the different hues of red in the towering walls, the scant trickle of water through eroded channels, the cries of hawks, ages-old campsites out of the elements, greyed and twisted wood, dust-laden sagebrush and dried grasses, and ankle-wearing rocks.

Most dreams vanish once morning light hits. This dream stuck. It was a real place. I just lacked physical evidence.

Nearly two years later I visited relatives in Guymon, Okla. One morning I decided to take a day trip south into the Texas Panhandle to visit Amarillo and the Panhandle-Plains Museum in Canyon. After buying some pre-Clinton-Biden-Brady-ban AR-15 magazines at a gun show in Amarillo's Civic Center and consuming a tolerable, but not Kansas-quality, steak, I visited "Texas' Largest History Museum" on the West Texas A&M University campus. With more than 3 million artifacts, some also call it the state's Smithsonian Institution.

After two hours, I had seen only a speck of the place. Part of the museum was off-limits because of remodeling work. Some of the main exhibits featured Palo Duro Canyon, 12 miles east of Canyon.

Amarillo and Canyon sit atop what Francisco Coronado named the Llano Estacado, a mesa larger than all of New England, in 1541. Like much of of the plains, even yet referred to as the Great American Desert, the Llano Estacado looks flatter than unleavened bread. At least until one looks closer. Widening and deepening cracks proved the first theory wrong as I drove east. Eventually the cracks grew so wide the highway could not skirt them. The road relented to the variformed, segmented depths of Palo Duro Canyon.

Just that initial drop from caprock reminded me of Georgia O'Keeffe's description of the canyon captured in a display of her work at the museum. "It is a burning, seething cauldron, filled with dramatic light and color."

As I spent the rest of the light experiencing an iota of the 120-mile-long rift, I knew the place from my dream is somewhere along the Texas Panhandle's Caprock Escarpment. If it can't be found in Palo Duro Canyon, once home to the Comanche and Charles Goodnight's JA Ranch, there are the Tule and Caprock Canyons.

I suspect I'll go back if only in a dream.

Old Soldiers Never Die: The Ruins of Fort Union

Some things we sense lack an obvious scientific explanation. Many cottage industries and what skeptics term as junk or psuedo-sciences are hinged on déjà vu, the feeling of having lived past lives, dreams, apparitions and second sight. So much unexplained phenomena involves old military posts and battlefields. There is Fort Sheridan's "Woman in Orange", the still-heard rallying cries of the Irish Brigade at Antietam, and the ghost of Lt. Benjamin H. Hodgson of Co. B, 7th Cavalry, of Little Bighorn.

Fort Union, New Mexico, is one of those places ghost hunters visit. The adobe, brick and limestone ruins rise up like Stonehenge from the windswept blue grama. Miles of ruts, carved by countless freight wagons between the 1820s and 1870s, still lead to and from the fort.

Disney World it's not. Lt. Colonel Edwin V. Sumner, the post's first commander, picked the site of Fort Union in part because it was far from Santa Fe, "that sink of vice and extravagance." Even though it's not far from Interstate 25, Fort Union is still isolated. There's no doubt why the 10th Infantry sang "There's a Land that is Fairer than This" in 1891 when marching out at last.

It was a stunningly quiet fall afternoon when I visited. I heard little beyond the geese honking and the Stars and Stripes flapping overhead at first. As the gnomon's shadow marched across the relic sundial on the parade ground, it seemed nonsensical to think of time as flowing onward from now toward the future. Albert Einstein wrote, People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

If you've heard regimental band music or have seen a troop of cavalry ride into dust at a place like Fort Union, I'm not going to question your sanity. I'm not certain why I sensed what I did on those flagstone paths laid down so long ago. The energy will remain long after the adobe bricks have all turned back to dust.

Weston and camping

I love to camp and study history, so this Labor day weekend I'm going to do both. Weston is a historic town that was once a bustling trade center on the east bank of the Missouri River.

However, Mother Nature conspired against mankind yet again and the river channel moved west. Weston is now somewhat frozen in time. It is a great place to relax and get a sense of what the past was like.

There's a link if you want to read more.