Ronald E. Yates's Blog, page 88

The Properly Equipped War Correspondent, ca. 1905

Having just finished the third book in my Finding Billy Battles trilogy, which begins in 1914, I find myself still deeply immersed in the lifestyle and routine of that period.

Because my central character, William Battles, is (among other things) a journalist who spends time covering (and participating in) conflicts in places like French Indochina ca. 1894, the Philippines ca. 1898, and Mexico in 1914-17, I was intrigued by the kind of “kit” correspondents of that era took with them into the bush.

I recalled reading something Richard Harding Davis, one of America’s most legendary foreign correspondents, wrote for Scribner’s Magazine in 1905. It was entitled: “A War Correspondent’s Kit.” Scribners was a highly popular magazine that featured such writers as Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, and John Galsworthy, to name a few.

[image error]  Richard Harding Davis

 I often shared portions of Davis’s article with the class on International Reporting and Foreign Correspondents I taught for some 13 years at the University of Illinois.

I thought my blog followers might find it interesting, if nothing else, for the prodigious amount of bulky and weighty gear intrepid correspondents lugged into the field more than 100 years ago.

In Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful 1938 satirical novel about journalism and war correspondents, he tells of hacks bringing bundles of “cleft sticks” with them to the fictional African nation of Ishmaelia.

[image error] Zulu courier carrying a message in a cleft stick

For those unaware of what a cleft stick is, it is a stick that has been partially severed along the grain of the wood to make a tight, springy clasp to carry some object—most commonly, written messages or, in the case of Scoop, news stories.

I must confess that not once during my 25 years as a foreign correspondent did I ever send a message using a cleft stick. I am not sure that Davis ever did either. At least he doesn’t include them on the list of essential items for the suitably kitted out correspondent of 1905.

I hope you will enjoy this little journey to the past.

A War Correspondent’s Kit   (slightly annotated and abridged)

Scribner’s, April 1905.

By Richard Harding Davis    

I am going to try to describe some kits and outfits I have seen used in different parts of the world by travelers and explorers, and in different campaigns by army officers and war correspondents.

In recommending any article for an outfit, one needs to be careful. An outfit lends itself to dispute because the selection of its parts is not an exact science. It should be, but it is not.

The truth is that each man in selecting his outfit follows the lines of least resistance. With one, the pleasure he derives from his morning bath outweighs the fact that for the rest of the day he must carry a rubber bathtub. Another man is hearty, tough, and inured to an out-of-door life. He can sleep on a pile of coal or standing on his head, and he naturally scorns to carry a bed. But another man, should he sleep all night on the ground, the next day would be of no use to himself or his newspaper. So, he carries a folding cot and the more fortunate one of tougher fiber laughs at him.

Another man says that the only way is to travel “light,” and sets forth with raincoat and field-glass. He honestly thinks that he travels light because his intelligence tells him it is the better way; but, as a matter of fact, he does so because he is lazy. Throughout the entire campaign he borrows from his friends, and with that camaraderie and unselfishness that never comes to the surface so strongly as when men are thrown together in camp, they lend him whatever he needs. When the war is over, he is the man who goes about saying: “Some of those fellows carried enough stuff to fill a moving van. Now, look what I did. I made the entire campaign on a tooth-brush.”

On one march my own outfit was as unwieldy as a gypsy’s caravan. It consisted of an enormous cart, two oxen, three Basuto ponies, one Australian horse, three servants, and four hundred pounds of supplies and baggage. When it moved across the plain, it looked as large as a Fall River boat. Later, when I joined the opposing army and was not expected to maintain the dignity of a great London daily, I carried all my belongings strapped to my back, or to the back of my one pony, and I was quite as comfortable, clean, and content as I had been with the private car and the circus tent.

Personally, I am for traveling “light,” but at the very start, one is confronted with the fact that what one man calls light to another savors of luxury. I call fifty pounds light.

The list of articles I find most useful when traveling where it is possible to obtain transport, or, as we may call it, traveling heavy, are the following:

A tent, seven by ten feet, with fly, jointed poles, tent-pins, and a heavy mallet. I recommend a tent open at both ends with a window cut in one end. The window furnishes a draught of air. The window should be covered with a flap which, in case of rain, can be tied down.

A great convenience in a tent is a pocket sewn inside of each wall, for boots, books, and such small articles. The pocket should not be filled with anything so heavy as to cause the walls to sag. Another convenience with a tent is a leather strap stretched from pole to pole, upon which to hang clothes, and another is a strap to be buckled around the front tent-pole, and which is studded with projecting hooks for your lantern, water bottle, and field-glasses.

I consider first in importance the folding bed. Second, in importance, I would place a folding chair. Many men scoff at a chair as a cumbersome luxury. But after a hard day on foot or in the saddle, when you sit on the ground with your back to a rock and your hands locked around your knees to keep yourself from sliding, or on a box with no rest for your spinal column, you begin to think a chair is not a luxury, but a necessity.

[image error] Vintage Ad for Gold Medal Folding Cot

As a rule, a cooking kit is built like every other cooking kit in that the utensils for cooking are carried in the same pot that is used for boiling the water, and the top of the pot turns itself into a frying-pan.

In importance after the bed, cooking kit, and chair, I would place these articles:

Two collapsible water-buckets of rubber or canvas.
Two collapsible brass lanterns, with extra isinglass sides.
Two boxes of sick-room candles.
One dozen boxes of safety matches.
One ax. The best I have seen is the Marble Safety Axe, made at Gladstone, Mich. You can carry it in your hip-pocket, and you can cut down a tree with it.
One medicine case containing quinine, calomel, and Sun Cholera Mixture in tablets.
Toilet-case for razors, tooth-powder, brushes, and paper.
Folding bathtub of rubber in a rubber case. These are manufactured to fold into a space little larger than a cigar-box.
Two towels old, and soft.
Three cakes of soap.
One Jaeger blanket.
One mosquito head-bag.
One extra pair of shoes, old and comfortable.
One extra pair of riding breeches.
One extra pair of gaiters. The former regulation army gaiter of canvas, laced, rolls up in a small compass and weighs but little. (NOTE: Gaiters were worn over the shoe and lower pants leg, and used primarily as personal protective equipment.)
One flannel shirt. Gray least shows the dust.
Two pairs of drawers. For riding, the best are those of silk.
Two undershirts, Balbriggan or woolen.
Three pairs of woolen socks.
Two linen handkerchiefs, large enough, if needed, to tie around the throat and protect the back of the neck.
One pair of pajamas, woolen, not linen.
Two briarwood pipes.
Six bags of smoking tobacco; Durham or Seal of North Carolina pack efficiently.
One pad of writing paper.
One fountain pen self-filling.
One bottle of ink, with screw top, held tight by a spring.
One dozen linen envelopes.
Stamps, wrapped in oil silk with mucilage side next to the silk.
One stick sealing-wax. In tropical countries mucilage on the flap of envelopes sticks to everything except the envelope.
One dozen elastic bands of the largest size. In packing they help to compress articles like clothing into the smallest possible compass and in many other ways will be found very useful.
One pack of playing-cards.
Books.
One revolver and six cartridges.

I place the water-buckets first on the list for the reason that I have found them one of my most valuable assets. With one, as soon as you halt, instead of waiting for your turn at the well or water-hole, you can carry water to your horse, and one of them once filled and set in the shelter of the tent, later saves you many steps. It also can be used as a nose-bag, and to carry fodder.

I recommend the brass-folding lantern because those I have tried of tin or aluminum have invariably broken. A lantern is an absolute necessity. When before daylight you break camp or hurry out in a windstorm to struggle with flying tent pegs, or when at night you wish to read or play cards, a lantern with a stout frame and steady light is indispensable.

The original cost of the sick-room candles is more than that of ordinary candles, but they burn longer, are brighter, and take up much less room. To protect them and the matches from dampness, or the sun, it is well to carry them in a rubber sponge bag. Anyone who has forgotten to pack a towel will not need to be advised to take two.

Every man knows the dreary halts in camp when the rain pours outside, or the regiment is held in reserve. For times like these, a pack of cards or a book is worth carrying, even if it weighs as much as the plates from which it was printed. At present, it is easy to obtain all of the modern classics in volumes small enough to go into the coat-pocket. In Japan, before starting for China, we divided up among the correspondents Thomas Nelson & Sons’ and Doubleday, Page & Co.’s pocket editions of Dickens, Thackeray, and Lever, and as most of our time in Manchuria was spent locked up in compounds, they proved a great blessing.

In the list I have included a revolver, following out the old saying that “You may not need it for a long time, but when you do need it, you want it damned quick.” Except to impress guides and mule-drivers, it is not an essential article. In six campaigns I have carried one, and never used it, nor needed it but once, and then while I was dodging behind the foremast it lay under tons of luggage in the hold. The number of cartridges I have limited to six, on the theory that if in six shots you haven’t hit the other fellow, he will have hit you, and you will not require another six.

This, I think, completes the list of articles that on different expeditions I either have found of use or have seen render good service to someone else.

But the sagacious man will pack none of the things enumerated in this article. For the larger his kit, the less benefit he will have of it. It will all be taken from him. And accordingly, my final advice is to go forth empty-handed, naked and unashamed and borrow from your friends. I have never tried that method, but I have never seen it fail, and of all travelers, the man who borrows is the wisest.

(NOTE: How did I travel when covering war and mayhem in the pre-laptop and smartphone era? With a typewriter, paper, notebook, pen and my Chicago Tribune American Express Gold Card, and nary a pair of silk drawers.)

 

 

How Political Correctness is Destroying America (Part 4)

( By popular demand, I am re-running a series of posts I published a while back about Political Correctness and the impact it is having on our country)

Vladimir Lenin, the man who in 1917 created the now-defunct one-party socialist state called The Soviet Union, understood how critical education is in molding pliant minds.

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted,” he once said.

[image error] Lenin

Lenin knew that planting the seeds of communist doctrine in the young would result in ideas that were not only intransigent but enduring. He was right–at least until the late 1980s when the old Soviet Union began to crumble under the crushing weight of decades of intractable political miscalculation, failed socialist ideology, and acute economic infirmity.

When I look at that quote from Lenin, I can’t help thinking about what is happening in many of our schools and universities today as the iniquitous objectives of Political Correctness continue to run rampant through the classroom.

Examples of PC in our schools are everywhere.

Increasingly we see schools intent on indoctrinating children with PC ideas and behavior. Too many public schools have become “Big Brother” indoctrination centers that monitor, track, scrutinize, and condition children to behave in “acceptable ways.”

The PC fanatics who are running too many of our schools are seeking to impose uniformity of thought and behavior on children while stigmatizing those who dissent or who insist on impeding their values with things like free speech or objective intellectual inquiry.

Actual education and instruction, meanwhile, continue to decline.

Don’t say anything that might offend little Johnny or Mary. Don’t wear t-shirts with the American flag on them. That might offend non-Americans. Don’t use your finger as an imaginary gun and point it at another. That is threatening.

And let’s not compete. Let’s have all sports events end in a tie. There are no winners or losers. Give everybody a trophy for just showing up. One middle school went so far as to ban footballs, baseballs and soccer balls during recess because students might get hurt playing competitive games with them.

Now at least one university has decided that personal pronouns should no longer be used by students.

Administrators at the University of Tennessee worry that students might be offended by the use of traditional pronouns like she, he, him and hers, according to the university’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

“With the new semester beginning and an influx of new students on campus, it is important to participate in making our campus welcoming and inclusive for all,” wrote Donna Braquet on the university’s website. “One way to do that is to use a student’s chosen name and their correct pronouns.”[image error]

“Correct pronouns?”  Yes, says Braquet, who is director of the university’s Pride Center. “There are dozens of gender-neutral pronouns we can use instead of traditional pronouns.

Her solution is to rewrite critical elements of the English language, which apparently she considers offensive.

Remember when you were in school and the only pronouns were him and her, he and she, etc.?

Well get ready for the new (and improved?) gender-neutral pronouns: ze, hir, zir, xe, xem and xyr.

PC Madness? You bet. But don’t tell Braquet that.

“These may sound a little funny at first, but only because they are new,” she insists. “The ‘she’ and ‘he’ pronouns would sound strange too if we had been taught ‘ze’ when growing up.”

Thank God Braquet and her dopey ideas about gender-neutral language were not around when I was learning English back in the Pleistocene era.

But Braquet doesn’t stop there. “Instead of calling roll, ask everyone to provide their name and pronouns,” she wrote in her post. “This ensures you are not singling out transgender or non-binary students.” Non-binary students?

“We should not assume someone’s gender by their appearance, or by what is listed on a roster or in student information systems,” Braquet continued. “Transgender people and people who do not identify within the gender binary may use a different name than their legal name and pronouns of their gender identity, rather than the pronouns of the sex they were assigned at birth.”

Assigned at birth? Does that mean we may have been mislabeled in the delivery room?

OK, whatever happened to educating children and students about American history, math, science, etc.?

This is just another example of the totalitarian nature of Political Correctness on college campuses.

[image error]

If you dare depart from the imposed “norms” established by Feminazis, homosexual-rights activists or any other PC-anointed “victim” group, you do so at your peril.

People who challenge the PC-madness saturating our institutions of learning are liable to face some form of retribution and even punishment.

Students have been expelled from school for using what academic kangaroo courts deem “inappropriate behavior, offensive language, or hate speech.”

Yet it is okay for PC-demented teachers and professor to infuse children and students with the idea that America (whoops–one school has already banned that word) is at the root of all the world’s problems; that the founding fathers were a bunch of malevolent old white men who hated women and minorities; and that all the evil in the world is a result of American (that word again) power, hegemony, and exceptionalism.

Once upon time schools actually educated children and gave them a broad, useful understanding of American history. They explained America’s uniqueness in history and imparted knowledge of and appreciation for our Constitution and the rights that it guarantees.

Then along came political correctness and socialism and ideas that were once considered worthy and beneficial were suddenly turned on their head. No longer was the goal to prepare high school and college graduates to be good citizens and informed voters. Now the goal was to turn out millions of “right-thinking” young people who left school believing that government and only government could solve their problems.

[image error]

That, my friend, is the epitome of totalitarianism.

Increasingly today we are seeing that schools are forbidding children to acknowledge the reality of our history. Instead, they are filling children’s heads with a revisionist view of our history–one that attempts to marginalize people like Jefferson, Washington, and Adams.

Our founding fathers are “exposed” as examples of Western class, gender, and racial evil. One school in the state of Washington is even teaching that the Bill of Rights is outdated and needs to be rewritten–and has given students an assignment to do just that.

If I think too long and too hard about all of this, I get a headache.

The only cure, I have found, is to find some politically incorrect jokes, read them, and laugh out loud.

Try it. It may work for you too. These are from across the pond where politically incorrect humor still rages:

How does the leader of ISIS practice safe sex? He marks the camels that kick.
I was walking down the road when I saw an Afghan bloke standing on a fifth-floor balcony shaking a carpet.

I shouted up to him, “What’s up Abdul, won’t it start?”
An older couple goes out to dinner to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. After dinner, they decide to stop in at an old disco the used to go to when they were dating. As they walk in, they see this older gentleman out on the dance floor, and he’s doing backflips, moonwalking, jitterbugging and really cuttin’ a rug. The guy’s wife said, “you see that guy? 25 years ago he proposed to me, and I turned him down” Husband said, “looks like he’s still celebrating to me.”

 

 

 

 

 

How Political Correctness is Destroying America (Part 3)

( By popular demand, I am re-running a series of posts I published a while back about Political Correctness and the impact it is having on our country)

Once upon a time in America, we used to be able to laugh at ourselves. And nobody was offended. Just listen to old radio shows, and you will see what I mean.

Without a doubt, the old Fred Allen radio shows would be banned today because of the ethnic humor displayed in a segment called “Allen’s Alley.”

[image error]Allen’s AlleyThere was the wry Jewish housewife Pansy Nussbaum, stoic New England farmer Titus Moody, and bellowing Southern Senator Beauregard Claghorn–all stereotypes that in today’s hypersensitive culture would be considered politically incorrect.

Allen’s show ran from the 1930s into the late 1940s, and it was really funny. I discovered it, and other fantastic comedy radio shows like Jack Benny, George Burns & Gracie Allen, and Bob Hope in the 1960s when there was an old-time radio revival and many old radio shows were rebroadcast on stations devoted to nostalgia.

I can still recall listening to Senator Claghorn say things like: “Somebody, Ah say, somebody knocked;” “I’m from the South, Suh;” “That’s a joke, son”; and “Pay attention, boy!”

After talking with Sen. Claghorn, Allen would introduce the next guest in the ally by saying:  “It’s Titus Moody.” The stoic New Englander would answer with a sardonic “Howdy, Bub.”

Then there was Mrs. Nussbaum who spoke with a decidedly German/Yiddish accent and when Allen introduced her, said things like “You were expecting maybe…” at which point she would butcher some famous person’s name “…Veinstein Chuychill?”

In their book The Big Broadcast 1920-1950, Frank Buxton and Bill Owen wrote:  “[Claghorn, Nussbaum, and Moody,] were never criticized as being anti-Southern, anti-Semitic, or anti-New England. The warmth and good humor with which they were presented made them acceptable even to the most sensitive listeners.”

Sadly, the Political Correctness Gestapo that pervades America today would disagree.

And so do many of today’s comedians who have gone on the record lamenting the hyper-sensitivities of today’s readily offended audiences as well as the death of the kind of humor that made Fred Allen a staple with audiences.

Take the recent turmoil regarding Trevor Noah, who will take over the Daily Show next month. After his selection as the show’s new host was announced several of his old tweets that were considered racist and sexist were posted online. Noah was quickly condemned by the media, prompting several fellow comedians to come to his defense. The problem, several said, wasn’t Noah’s bad jokes, but an overly sensitive public.

Writing in Time Magazine, comedian Jim Norton said: “Trevor, while tweeting things with the intention of being funny, had gone … yes, you guessed it – over the line!… In his rush to be funny, he had broken what has become the new golden rule in American public life, which is to never say anything (or, God forbid, joke about anything) that may be deemed even remotely offensive or upsetting by any segment of the population for any reason…”

For your consideration, I offer several more comments from comedians and comics who feel the political correctness that permeates America today is robbing us of our ability to laugh at ourselves and others.

John Cleese of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers fame explained recently that he stopped using any race-related jokes when he was criticized for telling jokes about Mexicans in his routine.

“Make jokes about Swedes and Germans and French and English and Canadians and Americans, why can’t we make jokes about Mexicans? Is it because they are so feeble that they can’t look after themselves? It’s very, very condescending there.”

During a recent interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, Daniel Lawrence Whitney (Larry the Cable Guy) said political correctness had gone too far.  

“It’s gotten way outta control. You know. I really think that we’re at a point in this country where people really need to take the thumb outta their mouth and grow up a little bit and realize there’s a lot bigger problems out there than what a comedian did a joke about.”

Take a look at the Cable Guy’ “politically correct” version of “The Night Before Christmas:”

Gilbert Gottfried recently wrote a piece for Playboy Magazine called “The Apology Epidemic” in which he said America’s current “apology culture” has gone too far.

“Imagine if the most brilliant comedians in history were working today,” he wrote. “They’d never stop apologizing. Charlie Chaplin would have to apologize to all the homeless people he belittled with his Little Tramp character. W.C. Fields and Dean Martin would both have to apologize to alcoholics. The Marx brothers would have to apologize to Italians, mutes and uptight British ladies. Comedy has been around for a long, long time, and there have been a lot of impolite, unpleasant and jaw-droppingly politically incorrect jokes. You went up there as a comic and joked about it all, and nothing was off-limits. And to this day, nobody has died from a single joke.”

Comedienne Lisa Lampanelli recently wrote an article for the Hollywood Reporter called: “How Political Correctness is Killing Comedy.”

In it, she said: “Here’s the problem: Comedy, probably more than any other art form, is subjective. What jokes crack up your mom, your little brother and your gay best friend will be completely different — unless it’s a video of a guy getting hit in the gonads with a piñata stick. That’s funny to everyone….If you like safe, generic comedy that’s fine. Go on a cruise ship and crack up listening to the comedian point out the hilarious differences between loafers and shoes with laces. But don’t go to one of my shows and be outraged by what you hear. Going to my show and expecting me not to cross the line of good taste and social propriety is like going to a Rolling Stones concert and expecting not to hear ‘Satisfaction.’”

Canadian comedian, Russell Peters might have summed it all up best in a recent interview. Society, he said, has become overly sensitive. And political correctness is the reason.

“If you look at TV in the ‘70s versus TV now, and you see the things people said back in the day – they said the most off-color stuff and nobody’s feelings were hurt. Do you know why? Because it’s about intent. The intent then was to make you laugh. And the intent is still to make you laugh, but they’ve (the PC Police) drilled it in into your head that you’re not supposed to laugh at this.”

In my humble opinion, when a nation can no longer laugh at itself, we are in big trouble.

Political Correctness is a treacherous wedge that is dividing and polarizing us. Its proponents believe we should all think alike. But we are individuals. We don’t all think alike or laugh at the same things. Thank God!

[image error] NOT PC!

That is not how the real world works. You won’t get far trying to walk through life on eggshells.

Kill me with comedy.  I’d rather die laughing than crying.

In that spirit, I offer up a couple of politically incorrect jokes for your amusement and consideration.

Q: Have you heard about McDonald’s new Liberal Value Meal?

A: Order anything you like, and the guy behind you has to pay for it.


When asked if they would have sex with Bill Clinton, 86% of women in D.C. said, “Not again.”


What does Nancy Pelosi call illegal aliens? Undocumented Democrats.

There. Now the PC Mafia and all the other handwringing moral guardians out there can lambast me for sharing such horribly politically incorrect humor.

And that’s no laughing matter.

(NEXT, PART 4: WHERE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS LEADING US)

 

 

 

 

How Political Correctness is Destroying America (Part 2)

( By popular demand, I am re-running a series of posts I published a while back about Political Correctness and the impact it is having on our country)

What would happen if the Political Correctness Fanatics decided to rewrite a few 19th Century fairy tales to make them more suitable to the pliable minds of children in the politically correct 21st Century?

I shudder to think.

But someone already has thought about this, and I am going to share a PC version of Little Red Riding Hood that came to me via The Internet the other day.

Please enjoy. (Or not, depending on your PC meter.)

And thanks to the anonymous author of this PC masterpiece.

Politically Correct Little Red Riding Hood

There once was a young person named Little Red Riding Hood who lived on the edge of a large forest full of endangered owls and rare plants that would probably provide a cure for cancer if only someone took the time to study them.

Red Riding Hood lived with a nurture giver whom she sometimes referred to as “mother,” although she didn’t mean to imply by this term that she would have thought less of the person if a close biological link did not in fact exist.

Nor did she intend to denigrate the equal value of nontraditional households, although she was sorry if this was the impression conveyed.

One day her mother asked her to take a basket of organically grown fruit and mineral water to her grandmother’s house.

[image error]

“But mother, won’t this be stealing work from the unionized people who have struggled for years to earn the right to carry all packages between various people in the woods?”

Red Riding Hood’s mother assured her that she had called the union boss and gotten a special compassionate mission exemption form.

“But mother, aren’t you oppressing me by ordering me to do this?”

Red Riding Hood’s mother pointed out that it was impossible for women to oppress each other since all women were equally oppressed until all women were free.

“But mother, then shouldn’t you have my brother carry the basket, since he’s an oppressor, and should learn what it’s like to be oppressed?”

And Red Riding Hood’s mother explained that her brother was attending a special rally for animal rights, and besides, this wasn’t stereotypical women’s work, but an empowering deed that would help engender a feeling of community.

“But won’t I be oppressing Grandma, by implying that she’s sick and hence unable to independently further her selfhood?”

But Red Riding Hood’s mother explained that her grandmother wasn’t actually sick or incapacitated or mentally handicapped in any way, although that was not to imply that any of these conditions were inferior to what some people called “health”.

Thus Red Riding Hood felt that she could get behind the idea of delivering the basket to her grandmother, and so she set off.

Many people believed that the forest was a foreboding and dangerous place, but Red Riding Hood knew that this was an irrational fear based on cultural paradigms instilled by a patriarchal society that regarded the natural world as an exploitable resource, and hence believed that natural predators were, in fact, intolerable competitors.

Other people avoided the woods for fear of thieves and deviants, but Red Riding Hood felt that in a truly classless society all marginalized peoples would be able to “come out” of the woods and be accepted as valid lifestyle role models.

On her way to Grandma’s house, Red Riding Hood passed a woodchopper, and wandered off the path, to examine some flowers.

She was startled to find herself standing before a Wolf, who asked her what was in her basket.

[image error]

Red Riding Hood’s teacher had warned her never to talk to strangers, but she was confident in taking control of her own budding sexuality and chose to dialog with the Wolf.

She replied, “I am taking my Grandmother some healthful snacks in a gesture of solidarity.”

The Wolf said, “You know, my dear, it isn’t safe for a little girl to walk through these woods alone.”

Red Riding Hood said, “I find your sexist remark offensive in the extreme, but I will ignore it because of your traditional status as an outcast from society, the stress of which has caused you to develop an alternative and yet entirely valid worldview. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I would prefer to be on my way.”

Red Riding Hood returned to the main path and proceeded towards her Grandmother’s house.

But because his status outside society had freed him from slavish adherence to linear, Western-style thought, the Wolf knew of a quicker route to Grandma’s house.

He burst into the house and ate Grandma, a course of action affirmative of his nature as a predator.

Then, unhampered by rigid, traditionalist gender role notions, he put on Grandma’s nightclothes, crawled under the bedclothes, and awaited developments.

Red Riding Hood entered the cottage and said,

“Grandma, I have brought you some cruelty-free snacks to salute you in your role of wise and nurturing matriarch.”

The Wolf said softly “Come closer, child so that I might see you.”

Red Riding Hood said, “Goddess! Grandma, what big eyes you have!”

[image error]

“You forget that I am optically challenged.”

“And Grandma, what an enormous…I mean fine nose you have.”

“Naturally, I could have had it fixed to help my acting career, but I didn’t give in to such societal pressures, my child.”

“And Grandma, what very big, sharp teeth you have!”

The Wolf could not take any more of these specious slurs, and, in a reaction appropriate for his accustomed milieu, he leaped out of bed, grabbed Little Red Riding Hood, and opened his jaws so wide that she could see her poor Grandmother cowering in his belly.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Red Riding Hood bravely shouted. “You must request my permission before proceeding to a new level of intimacy!”

The Wolf was so startled by this statement that he loosened his grasp on her.

At the same time, the woodchopper burst into the cottage, brandishing an ax.

“Hands off!” cried the woodchopper.

“And what do you think you’re doing?” cried Little Red Riding Hood. “If I let you help me now, I would be expressing a lack of confidence in my abilities, which would lead to poor self-esteem and lower achievement scores on college entrance exams.”

“Last chance, sister! Get your hands off that endangered species! This is an FBI sting!” screamed the woodchopper, and when Little Red Riding Hood nonetheless made a sudden motion, he sliced off her head.

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“Thank goodness you got here in time,” said the Wolf. “The brat and her grandmother lured me in here. I thought I was a goner.”

“No, I think I’m the real victim, here,” said the woodchopper. “I’ve been dealing with my anger ever since I saw her picking those protected flowers earlier. And now I’m going to have such a trauma. Do you have any aspirin?”

“Sure,” said the Wolf.

“Thanks.”

“I feel your pain,” said the Wolf, as he patted the woodchopper on his back. Then he belched and said: “Do you have any Maalox?”

I don’t think I will be reading this version of Little Red Riding Hood to my grandchildren any time soon.

(NEXT, PART 3: HOW P.C. IS IMPACTING COMEDY TODAY)

How Political Correctness is Destroying America (Part 1)

( By popular demand, I am re-running a series of posts I published a while back about Political Correctness and the impact it is having on our country)

A long time ago a Pulitzer Prize-winning Kansas editor named William Allen White wrote an editorial in the Emporia Gazette entitled “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”

In it he railed against obtuse populist politicians and visionless citizens who he was convinced were running Kansas (my home state) into the ground.

[image error]  William Allen White

If White were around today there is little doubt that he would be inveighing against the descendants of those thickheaded populists, some of whom have morphed into today’s Political Correctness Thought Police. I strongly suspect that he would already have written an editorial entitled “What’s The Matter With America?” in which he takes the PC Gestapo to task.

For those of us who utilize words for a living the idea of someone telling us we can only use words that the PC Police have decided are “correct” is not only an attack on our ability to express ourselves using the tools (words) of our trade, it is an attack on the First Amendment that guarantees, among other things, free speech.

For the first time in our history, Americans must be afraid of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. Today, we must be worried about using words the PC Police have determined are offensive or insensitive.

Do so, and you are liable to lose your job or be accused of being racist, sexist, or homophobic.

Sadly, universities, with their “speech codes” are the biggest proponents of this political correctness–and, as such, are becoming opponents of the First Amendment.

The very institutions that should be marketplaces of ideas by fostering uninhibited discussion and speech, are becoming more and more restrictive in an effort to promote inclusiveness and encourage tolerance.

Take the recent example of the University of New Hampshire.

In its new “Bias-Free Language Guide” posted on the University’s website, using the words “American,” “obese,” “normal,” “mothering,” “fathering,” “homosexual,” “illegal alien,” and “senior citizens,” is offensive and should be discouraged.

What?

Even the word “American,” the guide said, is “problematic” because it “assumes the U.S. is the only country inside the continents of North and South America.” Really?

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Calling those who unlawfully cross our borders “illegal aliens” is also not PC. Undocumented immigrants are not “illegal.” They are “persons seeking asylum,” or “refugees.”

Furthermore, the word “foreigner” should be replaced with “international person.”

Are you kidding me?

Take a look at other examples of this political correctness run amok in the University of New Hampshire’s Language Guide:

“Caucasian” is replaced with “European-American individuals.”
“Mothering” and “Fathering” are replaced with “parenting” and “nurturing” so as to “avoid gendering a non-gendered activity.”
“Homosexual” is replaced with “gay,” “lesbian,” or “same gender loving.” (It is really too bad that the perfectly good English word “gay” has been commandeered by a vociferous and strident minority.)
“Obese” or “overweight” is replaced with “people of size.” What size? Large? Extra large? Humungous?
Calling somebody “poor” is a no, no. Now you must say “a person who lacks advantages that others have.” How patently ridiculous.

Those who have read George Orwell’s book “1984” will know that this is the 21st Century’s version of “Newspeak.”

Newspeak in Orwell’s dystopian novel was “a reduced language created by the totalitarian state as a tool to limit free thought and concepts that pose a threat to the regime such as freedom, self-expression, individuality, peace, etc. Any form of thought alternative to the regime’s construct is classified as “thoughtcrime.”

Sound familiar? It should. This is exactly what the Political Correctness Gestapo is doing today.

And it begins in the White House.

The Obama administration once banned all U.S. government agencies from producing any training materials that link Islam with terrorism. In fact, the FBI has gone back and purged references to Islam and terrorism from hundreds of old documents. Amazing.[image error]

As Orwell once said: “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Here a few more recent examples of this kind of PC insanity.

At a high school in California, five students were sent home for wearing T-shirts that displayed the American flag on the Mexican holiday of Cinco de Mayo. (This was California, right? Not Baja California?)

A Washington state college said its “non-discrimination” policy prevents it from stopping a transgender man from exposing himself to young girls inside a women’s locker room, according to a group of concerned parents. What next?

According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, it is illegal for employers to discriminate against criminals because it has a “disproportionate” impact on minorities.

Speaking a few years ago at American University, William Lind, an author, and journalist said: “America today is in the throes of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state.

“In “hate crimes” we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. It’s exactly what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now it’s coming here.

“And we don’t recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that it’s not funny, it’s here, it’s growing, and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.”

Are we to assume political correctness will fade only after the “gravitationally disadvantaged” lady has sung?”

George Orwell must be hooting from the grave.

(NEXT, PART 2: A Politically Correct Version of Little Red Riding Hood)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fascinating Facts For Word Lovers

As a someone whose primary tools are words, I am always interested in where these critical implements originated and how they continue to evolve.

The study of grammar, language, vocabulary–otherwise known as etymology–has always fascinated me. For those who enjoy writing and reading, what follows should be an entertaining romp through the worlds of philology, semantics, and dialectology.

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Don’t let those terms throw you. We are not talking about theoretical mathematics or quantum physics. It is a look at where some of the words and phrases we use every day come from, some of the anomalies of words, language and usage, and how certain expressions evolved.

What follows comes from a book entitled: 501 Things You Should Have Learned About Grammar. E njoy 

Did you know that “R” is the most commonly used consonant in the English language? Were you aware that the term “English” came before the name England?  Did you even realize that punctuation did not appear until the 15th century?

There is a treasure trove of fascinating facts in 501 Things You Should Have Learned About Grammar.  It’s a  book that linguists, lexicologists, book-lovers, grammarians, and those in book publishing should love.  The book is put out by Metro Books, an imprint of Sterling Publishing, the Barnes & Noble publishing company. It features sections on the history of English grammar, parts of speech, linguists, English around the world, and grammar through the ages.

Here are 35 items from the book that should entertain, if not stimulate, you:

Shitfaced” meant “young-looking” in the Scottish dictionary.  Yes, before 1826, shitfaced, according to Scottish dictionary meant small-faced.  It referred to someone who had boyish or young looks.
Queue” is the only word in the English language that doesn’t change in pronunciation if the last four letters are removed!
One of the most interesting facts about words in the English language is that the female form of all words in English are longer than their corresponding male forms, except for in one case. The word “widow” is an exception to this. Its male form “widower” is longer.
The oldest word in the Oxford English dictionary that is still in everyday use is “town.”
Forty is the only number in which the letters that form the word appear in the order that they appear in the English alphabet.
One is the only number in which the letters appear in the exact reverse order of their appearance in the English alphabet.
“Four” is the only word whose numerical value is equal to the number of letters in it! [image error]
Pangrams in English are sentences that contain all the letters in the English alphabet in a single sentence itself. Pangrams are used for testing typefaces, testing equipment, and for developing skills such as typing on keyboards, typewriting, handwriting, and calligraphy. Pangrams which are short and coherent are very difficult to come by, as English grammar has 26 different letters, and some of these, such as “q” and “x,” are not used very commonly. There is only one pangram in English which is short and universally accepted for keyboard testing. That pangram—“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
About 20,000 books ranging from poems, devotional pieces, grammar books, dictionaries and mythical stories were printed in the 150 years that followed the year 1476, which was when the printing press arrived in England.
There are no masculine nouns for certain professions like maid or seamstress in English.
The longest word in the English language that is commonly used and does not contain any letter that is repeated is “copyrightable.”
“Queueing” is the only word in the English language with five consecutive vowels appearing in it.
China has more English speaking people than the United States of America!
In the early 18th century, a large number of English words were being derived from names of people and places. Many have stuck on until today! The word “sandwich” owes its existence to the Earl of Sandwich, who, on a particular occasion, put a slice of meat in between two pieces of bread.
Over 80 different spellings of Shakespeare’s name have been documented, and it is interesting to note that he has used various spellings in all his six known signatures.
The printing press was first invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1439 in Germany. Each letter’s mirror image was carved in relief on a small block. Words were formed when blocks, which were quickly movable, were arranged to form different words.  The words were separated with the help of blank spaces, and this gave rise to a line of type, and some such lines of type gave rise to a page.
With the help of some borrowed money, Gutenberg started the “Bible Revolution” in the year 1452, wherein 200 copies of the two-volume Gutenberg Bible were printed, out of which only a small number of them were printed on vellum.”
By the year 1500, 13 million books were being circulated in Europe that was populated with 100 million people then.
The Gutenberg Bibles were expensive and beautiful and were sold at the 1455 Frankfurt Book Fair, where each one was equal to the amount an average clerk got his salary in three years. About 50 of these Bibles survive today.
The written English used in the official documents at the Court of Chancery, a court of equity in England and Wales, was what set a standard in grammar and vocabulary, and that’s where the term “Chancery English” originated.
Paradise Lost is amongst the most significant epics ever written in English. And what makes it even more special is the fact that the author John Milton (who had lost his eyesight by then) would mentally compose the verses at night and in the morning he would dictate them to his aides.
The discovery that English and Sanskrit had much in common, in spite of having little contact, stunned theorists. Surprised by the linguistic similarities between different languages, scholars began to hypothesize the existence of an ancient language called the “proto-Indo-European” language that would later give rise to the various branches of the Indo-European group.
Language historians now believe that the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European languages spread to different parts of the world. Their language (spoken between 4,000-6,000 years ago) changed with their travels, leading the original Proto-language to die out, but leaving several distinct elements in the languages that evolved later.
Words and sentences that are made by teaming up letters, numbers, or pictures are called Rebus. One example that we use in our day-to-day SMS lingo is “l8r,” which is short for “later.”
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Spoonerisms pop up when letters and sounds get misplaced. Missed becomes hissed, flags become hags, so on and so forth.
Malapropism: This term is used to denote the replacement of a correct word with the incorrect word because they sound similar.
“Puns are often called the lowest form of humor because of their reliance on manipulating the sound of words for effect. These are homophones, where the pun is created by replacing one word with another similar sounding one. For example “Old kings never die, they’re just throne away.”
An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines two or more contradictory phrases that, in sum, express an essential relation. Can you hear the deafening silence at that? If so, act natural.
Many grammarians believe that the process of onomatopoeia – words formed in the imitation of sounds – was the basis of the evolution of words in the human language. Human beings coined words out of exclamations they made or heard animal and birds make, or came across in their environment. This theory has been pooh-poohed by others who cite the fact that there are very few words in most human languages that are onomatopoeic.
Book and movie titles are also retrospectively used as metaphors – that’s a “Catch 22 situation,” “This is such a 1984ish nightmare” or “it’s a Cinderella story.
Incidentally, the English word “alphabet” is made by combining “alpha” and “beta,” the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.
Elizabethan English refers to the English and the laws of English grammar that existed during the period of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who was the Queen of England and Ireland from 1558 to 1603.
The Elizabethan Alphabet had 24 letters, unlike the present day alphabet, which has 26 letters. “u” and “v,” “I” and “j” were the same letter.
After the writers of the Bible, Shakespeare is the second most quoted writer in the English language.
By 1400, English had replaced French as the most widely spoken language in England. In 1500, the English dialect that became the most common among all of them was Westminster English. Speaking this dialect was considered to be a matter of great prestige.
A lot of Norman French words found their way into the English language. In today’s times, it is believed that over 30% of all English words are of French origin. Words like “joy,” “joyous,” “attaché,” and several others found their way into English courtesy Norman French.”

 

 

 

California Dreaming? Or California Nightmare?

Here’s a bit of news I never expected to hear about California. It ranks 50th; dead last; at the bottom of the heap, of all American states when it comes to quality of life, according to a recent ranking by U.S. News & World Report.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this revelation. After all, I live in California and I have witnessed what has happened to a state that once was the envy of the other 49.

California today is a terminus for the homeless, illegal aliens, MS-13 gang members, welfare cheaters, and clueless socialist politicians determined to transform the state into an abortive political and societal hodgepodge somewhere between communist Cuba and the impecunious wilds of Northern Mexico.

But let’s get back to the U.S. News analysis. The magazine’s quality of life rankings considered two sets of metrics for every state:

Natural environment, comprising drinking-water quality, air quality, and pollution and industrial toxins.
Social environment, comprising community engagement, social support, population density, and voter participation.

And guess what? California ranked near or at the bottom in each of those categories.

Little wonder. California, which calls itself the “Golden State,” is a mismanaged behemoth controlled by a mob of far-left zealots led by Gov. Jerry Brown, the state’s supreme leftist potentate.

This gang of political malefactors has sacked the state’s treasury, leaving it $427 billion in debt with a debt to GDP ratio of 15.6 percent. That means the debt for every one of California’s 39 million people is $10,818 and growing.

The state has long been a lodestone for illegal immigrants, but since Gov. Brown declared California a “sanctuary state,” a tidal wave of illegals, many with criminal backgrounds, is sweeping over the state’s splintered social landscape.

It is interesting to note that California’s high cost of living and its rising illegal immigration rates were two metrics that did not factor into the quality-of-life rankings.

Yet both are among the most obvious and disturbing issues facing the state.

Sanctuary cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland have opened their doors and coffers to illegal immigrants while American citizens are afforded the privilege of paying ever higher taxes to pay for this foolish munificence.

Recently, I received a tongue-in-cheek story suggesting that President Trump sell California back to Mexico. A map depicted the new U.S.-Mexican border running from Texas all the way to Oregon. There are some who feel jettisoning California might be a good thing. After all, Mexico ceded California to the United States in 1848 after the Mexican-American War. Maybe it’s time to send it back.[image error]

In any case, to watch California crumble before one’s eyes is disconcerting. But wait, you might ask, what about all of the millionaires living in places like Beverly Hills, Calabasas, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, San Diego and the Orange County coast? How can California be disintegrating when you still have all that wealth?

The fact is, more than one-third of the state is now populated by immigrants, half of them illegal. Then, the state’s homeless population is growing at an alarming rate with some 30,000 in Los Angeles alone. In Orange County, thousands of homeless tents and hovels occupy miles and miles of land along the Santa Ana River. As a result, human feces, discarded hypodermic needles, and mounds of trash litter the bicycle path that runs between the fleapits and the river while expensive homes sit just a few hundred yards away.

To make matters worse, housing prices have gone through the roof, leaving only a minority of Californians able to buy a house. What about renting? In the Los Angeles area, including San Diego and Riverside Counties, rents for a one bedroom apartment are running about $1,900 a month and for two and three bedroom apartments and homes, rents are between $2,500 and $3,500 per month.

This is NOT the California that I first moved to in 1976 or that former Governor Ronald Reagan oversaw between 1967 and 1975.

Yes, California is a state of incomparable wealth. The movie and music industries reside here as do enormously productive agricultural and high tech industries. In fact, California recently leapfrogged France and the United Kingdom to become the fifth-largest economy in the world with a gross domestic product of $2.5 trillion. Only Germany, China, Japan, and the European Union have higher GDPs.

So what’s the problem?

Let’s begin with the state’s water supply. It is unreliable and can barely sustain the current population and the needs of the state’s thirsty, drought-ridden agricultural sector. Then there is the crumbling infrastructure of freeways, roads, and bridges. To make matters worse, there is a wall of debt acerbated by an onerous and punitive tax structure, as well as a volatile budget system. Another recent study found that California ranked 49th in the cost of doing business and 50th in “business friendliness,” which translates into such things as onerous regulations, tax breaks, and quality of the workforce.

[image error] Homeless camps stretch for miles along Orange County bike path

There are also missed payments and mounting debt for excessive public retirement benefits, rising healthcare costs and diminishing access to health care, unstable funding for K-12 education, and poor student performance compared to other states. In addition, there are new and harsh restrictions on gun ownership that many see as a direct assault on the Second Amendment. Add to that the state’s skyrocketing cost of living and declining home ownership and the welcome mat looks a bit soiled.

Finally, there is rising crime and an overcrowded and costly prison system as well as a lack of transparency and eroding public trust in government that is compounded by apathetic voters and consistently low voter turnout.

All of that adds up to California’s 50th ranking when it comes to quality of life for its citizens.

Is it any wonder that hundreds of thousands of over-taxed Californians and hundreds of companies are bolting the state every year for places like Texas, Arizona, and Washington?

Meanwhile, California continues to be the nation’s leading nanny state for illegals, the homeless, criminals, and those who swill at the public trough.

What’s next for the Golden State?

It could fall into the Pacific Ocean, I guess.

A Mixed Metaphor Walks into a Bar….

All of us know that English is the most inconsistent, confusing, and maddening tongue on the planet. Unlike most other languages, it is often called a “bastard” language because of its multifarious etymological and philological foundations.

English, as we know, is a combination of Latin, Germanic, French, Saxon, Gallic, and Nordic tongues—to mention just a few. And while it belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, its grammatical rules are often bewildering and paradoxical—especially to non-English speakers who are learning the language.

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Recently somebody sent me some interesting examples of English grammar in action and I thought to myself, ‘this is a great way to teach the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of English grammar.’ 

Take a look and enjoy. You might even learn something.

A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

An Onomatopoeia screeches into a bar, sizzles, growls, and roars.

A question mark walks into a bar?

A non-sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Get out — we don’t serve your type.”

A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

A synonym strolls into a tavern.

At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar — fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

A dyslexic walks into a bra.

A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television getting drunk and smoking cigars.

A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar, and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.

 

Some Thoughts on the Art and Craft of Writing

I was interviewed recently about the art and craft of writing in general and writing in the historical fiction genre in particular.

As a journalist for some thirty years, I interviewed thousands of people all over the world. Now that I am on the other side of the table, I am finding that being the interviewee is as different from being the interviewer as chalk and cheese.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy being interviewed because it obliges me to think about what I do. It’s a lot like teaching. You must be able to verbalize your skills and knowledge and present them in a compelling way to teach effectively.

That’s not always easy to do. But I thought I would share my interview with my readers. I hope you will find it useful and perhaps even enjoyable.

Q. What historical time periods interest you the most and how have you immersed yourself in a particular time?

A. Growing up in rural Kansas I was always fascinated by the state’s 19th Century history. Kansas was a pivotal state before the Civil War because it entered the union as a free state and was populated–especially in the Northeast–by abolitionists. Kansas was a terminus for the Underground Railroad.

After the Civil War, it became about as wild and violent as any state in the union. Cattle drives from Texas, wild cow towns, outlaws, legendary lawmen and fraudsters of every stripe gave Kansas a wicked reputation. At the same time, the 19th Century in America was a time of fantastic growth, invention, progress, and expansion.

For some, such as Native Americans, this growth was not a pleasant experience, and in some cases, it was quite deadly. For others, the possibilities seemed limitless. Prosperity seemed restricted only by one’s determination and effort.

[image error]             Dodge City, Kansas

Q.  Introduce us briefly to the main characters in Book 1 of the Finding Billy Battles trilogy.

A. William Fitzroy Raglan Battles is the main character in the trilogy. We meet Billy Battles through his great-grandson who meets him when he is 98 years old and living in an old soldiers’ home in Leavenworth, Kansas. The great-grandson inherits Billy’s journals and other belongings. Then, following his great-grandfather’s request, he produces three books that reveal Billy’s fantastic life.

The book begins with Billy introducing himself. We learn that his father is killed during the Civil War. He is reared by his widowed mother, Hannelore, a second-generation German-American woman who has to be both mother and father to her only son, rears him.[image error]

It is a tall order, but Billy grows up properly and is seemingly on the right path. His mother, a hardy and resilient woman, makes a decent living as a dressmaker in Lawrence, Kansas. An ardent believer in the value of a good education, she insists that Billy attend the newly minted University of Kansas in Lawrence. She is a powerful influence in his life, as are several other people he meets along the way.

There is Luther Longley, an African-American former army scout who Billy and his mother meet at Ft. Dodge in 1866. He escorts them the 300 miles to Lawrence and winds up being a close friend to both Billy and his mother.

There is Horace Hawes, publisher and Editor of the Lawrence Union newspaper who takes Billy with him to start a new paper in Dodge City. There is Ben Minot, a typesetter and former Northern Army Sharpshooter, who still carries a mini ball in his body from the war and a load of antipathy toward The Confederacy.

There is Signore Antonio DiFranco; the Italian political exile Billy meets in Dodge City. There is Mallie McNab, the girl Billy meets, falls in love with, marries and with whom he hopes to live out his life. There is Charley Higgins, Billy’s first cousin, who sometimes treads just south of the law, but who is also Billy’s most faithful compadre.

Then there is the Bledsoe family–particularly Nate Bledsoe who blames Billy for the deaths of his mother and brother and who swears vengeance.

Book one of the trilogy ends with Billy on a steamship in 1894 heading for French Indo-China and other points in the Orient where one adventure (and misadventure) after another awaits him.

Book 2, The Improbable Journeys of Billy Battles, begins with Billy aboard the S.S. China headed for Saigon from San Francisco. Aboard the S.S. China Billy meets the mysterious Widow Katharina Schreiber, a woman who propels Billy into a series of calamities and dubious situations. She may or may not be a good influence on him.

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He also meets a passel of shady characters as well as some old friends from his days in Kansas, etc. Events conspire to embroil him in a variety of disputes, conflicts and struggles in places like French Indochina and the Spanish-American War in The Philippines–events with which a Kansas sand cutter is hardly equipped to deal.

How does he handle these adventures in the “mysterious East?” You will have to read Book #2 to find out!

Q. What drew you to write this story

A.I was intrigued by the idea of a 19th Century Kansas boy forced to deal with a string of tragedies and misadventures who eventually makes his way to the Far East in search of himself.

How would he handle himself in such strange places as French Indochina, the Spanish-controlled Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.? I spent most of my career as a foreign correspondent in Asia and I often wondered what it would have been like to have been in that part of the world in the 19th Century. This book gives me (and my readers) an opportunity to find out.

Q. On what are you currently working?

A. I just finished The Lost Years of Billy Battles, Book #3 of the trilogy. As Book 3 of the Finding Billy Battles trilogy begins we know where Billy is. He is in Chicago with his wife, the former Baroness Katharina von Schreiber living a sedate and comfortable life after years of adventure and tragedy. That changes with a single telephone call that yanks Billy and Katharina back into a life of turmoil and danger.

Persuaded by a powerful old friend to go undercover for the U.S. government the two find themselves in Mexico during the height of the violent 1910-1920 revolution. There they encounter assorted German spies, Mexican revolutionaries, devious political operatives, and other malefactors. Caught in the middle of the 1914 American invasion of Veracruz, they must find a way out while keeping their real identities secret.

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After managing to extract themselves from danger, disaster strikes. It is a tragedy Billy is all too familiar with and one that will send him plummeting into a painful abyss of despair and agony. Consequently, Billy vanishes leaving family and friends to wonder what happened to him. Where is he? Is he dead or alive? What provoked his disappearance? In Book 3 of the Finding Billy Battles Trilogy, those questions are answered, and the mystery behind Billy’s disappearance is finally revealed.

Q. Is there ever a time when you feel like your work is truly finished and complete?

A.I don’t know if that ever happens. I do know that at some point, YOU MUST LET IT GO! Writing a book is a bit like rearing a child. Eventually, after you have imbued the child with as much of your worldly experience and wisdom as he or she can grasp and absorb you have to allow your creation to encounter the world. It’s the same with books. Writers can fiddle with plots, characters, endings, and beginnings ad nauseam and never feel the book is finished. My advice. JUST FINISH THE DAMNED BOOK! Get over it and get the book out into the public domain. Readers will let you know if you have finished the book–and if they like it.

Q.  What is the most significant misconception beginning writers have about being published? 

A. Probably that once you get a publishing contract, you are going to become a millionaire. I have published two books before Billy Battles with traditional publishers, and I am still on the hunt for my first million. The J. K. Rowling’s of the world are anomalies. However, thank God they do exist because it keeps the rest of us working our tails off in pursuit of that elusive kind of success. I do believe many writers write for the sheer joy we get from telling a good story–at least I do. The $$ are less of an incentive.

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Q. What would I like readers to gain from reading my book(s)? 

A. Because the Finding Billy Battles trilogy is historical fiction and is set in the 19th Century, I would like readers to get a sense of the time and place of the story. I would like them to have an appreciation of the way people lived, how they thought, and how they dealt with both adversity and triumph in a very different era. Finally, I would like readers to finish the trilogy and think to themselves: “Damn, I didn’t want that story to end!”

Q.  Do you have some final words for readers or writers?

A. For Readers: Please DON’T STOP READING! Those of us who love telling stories need you. And when you read a book, don’t be shy. Write a review on Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes & Noble, etc. and let us know what you liked and didn’t like about a book. I value the reviews I get from Amazon Verified Purchase customers more than I do from professional or editorial reviewers. After all, customers spent money on the book and that gives them the right to tell the author what they think.

A. For Writers: Keep Writing. The world needs good storytellers today more than ever. I know that many who write are frustrated by letters of rejection from agents and publishers. Don’t be discouraged. If you can’t get a book before the reading public going the traditional publishing route, consider self or indie publishing. Publish on Demand (POD) books are everywhere these days and so are e-books. Writers today don’t have to feel a rejection letter the last word in their aspiration to publish. You have options to reach readers that didn’t exist 10 or even five years ago.

I must be honest, however. Many self-published books are not well done. The writing may be poor quality; the covers are often inferior, and the proofreading and editing are shoddy. Frankly, some books should never have made it off the printing press or into an e-file. However, there are enough gems coming from self-published authors to offset the marginal efforts.

Q. What advice do you have for beginners?

A. Give yourself time to learn the craft of writing. How do you do that? Read, read, and read. If you want to write well, read well. Learn from the best; imitate, and by that, I don’t mean plagiarize. Listen to the words! You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on writing seminars, conferences, etc. Gifted writing can’t be taught. It must be learned. And we learn from doing it; from experience.

Writing is a discipline that you can learn at any age. Unlike ballet or basketball or modeling, becoming an author is not something that if you missed doing at 16, 18 or 20, you could never do again. You are NEVER too old to begin writing!

[image error] Pearl S. Buck

I recall interviewing Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck once. It was late fall, 1971, and at the time she was living in Vermont. We were talking on the phone, and suddenly she began describing her backyard and what she said was the first snow of the season.

“You should see this, Ron. From my office window, I am watching a leisurely shower of white crystals floating, drifting, and landing softly onto a carpet of jade. I wish you could see it.”

“I do,” I said. “Thanks for showing me.”

I never forgot that conversation with the first American female Nobel laureate. She was 79 and still writing. Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her book “The Good Earth,” about life in rural China.

Finally, writing–as difficult as it is–should also be fun. When you turn a beautiful phrase or create a vivid scene, you should feel a little flutter in your heart, a shiver in your soul. If you do, that means you have struck an evocative chord with your writing. Nothing is more rewarding than that!

Write On!

 

My Favorite Classic Hotels

[One of the great things about being a foreign correspondent is the opportunity one has of staying in classic hotels around the world. During my career, I stayed in my share of them–some more classic than others. In some cases, I lived in a hotel for months at a time [the Continental Palace in Saigon, the old Le Phnom–now the Royal–in Phnom Penh, the Rosarito Beach Hotel in Baja California, etc.]. From time to time I will post a story I wrote about one of these classic inns. Today, I am sharing my look at the Grand Dame of Asia, the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong.]

‘LET’S MEET AT THE PEN,’ HONG KONG’S MOST ELEGANT GATHERING PLACE IS STILL THE PLACE TO BE

There are some experiences every traveler to Asia should savor at least once. There is the experience of strolling through that ancient and sprawling citadel of opulence and imperial intrigue called the Forbidden City in the heart of Beijing.

There is the experience of visiting the Grand Shrine on Japan’s lush Ise Peninsula–the most revered spot in The Land of the Rising Sun. Its assortment of ascetic Shinto shrines, surrounded by ancient forests of cedar and cypress, is where the spirits of Japan’s past emperors are enshrined.

And there is the experience of sitting in the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel on the southern tip of Kowloon Peninsula in what was, until July 1, 1997, the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.

True, the lobby of The Peninsula cannot match the verdant panoramas of Ise or the expansive dimensions of the Forbidden City.

But sitting in the legendary lobby of The Pen is nevertheless one of those splendid little Asian experiences that should not be missed.

[image error] The Peninsula’s Exquisite Lobby

From the time the hotel opened in 1928 the long, rectangular, neoclassical lobby has been Hong Kong’s most elegant gathering place. For 80 years the phrase “Let’s meet at The Pen” has meant “Let’s meet in the lobby of The Peninsula.”

And that’s exactly what thousands of people do every year. Some are attracted by the traditional afternoon tea with its strawberry cakes, sandwiches, and the hotel’s fabled green mango juice–all served in Tiffany chinaware on tables topped with marble.

A live string quartet plays Mozart, Haydn, and Vivaldi from a small corner balcony overlooking the lobby. In the evening the mood changes. Jazz supplants Rococo and Baroque, and more robust liquid refreshment flows forth.

But even though the music and refreshment are terrific, there is another, more compelling reason to visit the lobby of The Pen. It offers Asia’s best venue for that age-old pastime: people watching.

It’s an eclectic, multinational crowd that passes through the hotel’s massive glass doors and into the lobby today–some in linen and jeans, some in Dior and Armani.

But back in the early 1970s when this correspondent first made The Pen’s acquaintance, the lobby was still frequented by aging relics of the British Raj, who would gather in the evening for gin and tonic and watch the last rays of sunlight evaporate in the azure waters of Victoria Harbor.

Some would reminisce about pre-World War II Hong Kong, reflecting on a simpler era when high-rises didn’t obscure the jade hills of Hong Kong Island and rickshaws still scurried along the colony’s streets.

In those days, the only way to travel between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon was on the Star Ferry. The 12 green and white ferries have been making the 8-minute trip between Tsim-Sha-Tsui and Central Hong Kong Island since 1898, and the fare of HK $1.70 (about 22 U.S. cents) for the upper deck and HK $1.40 (about 18 cents) for the lower deck hasn’t changed in 98 years.

Despite those prices, the Cross Harbor Tunnel under Victoria Harbor is the route most car, bus, and truck traffic takes between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island today.

Although Hong Kong’s old hands offer parsimonious approval of the tunnel’s convenience, they are less forthcoming in their praise of Hong Kong in general. Some are still skeptical of the colony’s future since control shifted in 1997 from the British to the Communist regime in Beijing.

“Too damned many cloud scratchers,” opined a retired Swiss trader named Felix Hartfeld as he regarded the Hong Kong skyline with its ever-expanding forest of glass and granite skyscrapers. “The place is losing its character . . . .Its charm. If it had looked like this in 1938, I never would have come here. I certainly wouldn’t have come here if the Communists had been in control. Just wait. They’ll make a proper mess of everything.”

Old hands like Hartfeld are more forgiving of The Pen and the changes it has made through the years.

Nevertheless, Hartfeld and others of his generation affectionately recall the lobby of The Pen “B.A.C.” (before air conditioning) when teakwood paddle fans hung from its 25-foot ceilings, cool evening breezes blew through open doors from the harbor, and “ladies of ambiguous virtue” lounged at the tables on the left side of the lobby.

Why the left side? Because in those days it was the part of the lobby that was out of view of the front desk and, therefore, a discrete place for those to meet who didn’t want to be noticed.

“The left side of the lobby was for ladies who were, shall we say, available,” recalled Bryan Reid, a former Australian merchant marine captain who, in the 1960s and ’70s, ferried supplies between Hong Kong and Saigon. “The right side was for more virtuous Hong Kong society.”

Reid, now in his 70s, sighed. “Those were times,” he said lifting a glass of Tsingtao beer to his lips. “Those were some damned good times.”

The 1960s and ’70s were also a time of intense, internal turmoil for The Pen. For the first time since it opened its doors, The Pen was faced with a sudden burst of competition.

The first serious international competitor was the Hong Kong Hilton, which opened in 1963. As difficult as it is to believe today standing amid the opulence of The Peninsula, the Hilton–not the Peninsula–was Hong Kong’s first official five-star international hotel.

[image error] A Lobby Like No Other

Located across Victoria Harbor from The Pen on Hong Kong Island, the Hilton was one of those glass and granite towers so despised by people like Hartfeld. Its 820 rooms overlooked Queens Pier, the Star Ferry, and Chater Park. It had all the latest gadgetry, including the first Xerox copy machine in Hong Kong. (Sadly, the Hilton closed its doors in April 1995. The hotel was a favorite of many of the region’s foreign correspondents–due in large part to longtime general manager James Smith, a Scotsman, who had a soft spot for itinerant hacks. Even though the Hilton was earning about $500 million a year in revenue, it was sitting on land that could earn more than $1 billion annually as an office complex.)

Within a few years of the Hilton’s debut, other international hotels opened in Hong Kong, among them the Mandarin and the President.

The Regent Hong Kong, regarded as The Pen’s stiffest competition today, didn’t open until 1980. The 16-year-old, 602-room hotel sits on the shore of Victoria Harbor just down Salisbury Road from The Peninsula. Like The Peninsula, the red granite, 17-story Regent consistently ranks among the top five hotels in the world.

But back in the early 1970s, before there was a Regent to worry about, the Peninsula Group (the operations and marketing division of Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels Ltd.) which manages The Peninsula and six other hotels, was faced with another problem.

Those with eyes fixed firmly on the bottom line argued that with only 168 rooms The Pen couldn’t possibly compete with Hong Kong’s newer and much larger hotels. Across Salisbury Road, directly in front of the hotel, the Canton-Kowloon Railway station already had been torn down and prime waterfront real estate was beckoning to the bean counters.

It all added up to a compelling argument–even for the sentimentalists in the Peninsula Group who were reluctant to scrap decades of history and tradition.

And in the end, the profit motive did indeed win out, and plans were made to raze the old hotel and rebuild a much larger Peninsula along the edge of Victoria Harbor, about 100 yards from its current location.

When word got out about the plans to demolish The Pen, many of Hong Kong’s old hands were infuriated. How could the Peninsula Group even remotely consider demolishing one of Hong Kong’s icons–especially one that was the repository of so much of the colony’s fabled history?

Hong Kong was suddenly rife with amateur historians, recalled one Peninsula staff member. And each was intent on reminding the hotel’s management again and again of the role The Pen had played in that history.

Some of that history was made even before The Peninsula officially opened.

In 1927 Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists were battling China’s communists for control of mainland China. Faced with the genuine possibility that the struggle would spill over into Hong Kong, the British rulers of the colony brought troops into Hong Kong from India and the Middle East. They promptly commandeered the almost finished Peninsula and turned it into a barracks for the Second Battalion of the Coldstream Guards.

Machine guns were mounted on The Pen’s balcony so the troops could conduct target practice. Rooms became billets. Ammunition and supplies were stored in the hotel garage.

A year later, with order restored in China, the troops departed and at 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 11, 1928, the hotel officially opened its doors to its first paying guests.

The first person through the doors was Hong Kong’s governor, the Honorable Sir Wilfred Thomas Southorn. Hotel documents show that as Sir Wilfred entered The Pen’s lobby with his wife and several official guests, the band played “God Save the King,” followed by a march titled “Steadfast and True.”

Some 3,000 people roamed through the hotel that day, and it didn’t take long for the lobby to become what one colony wag called “Hong Kong’s emporium of gossip.”

That lasted until Christmas Day, 1941, when, after three weeks of fighting, Imperial Japanese troops took the colony. On that day British Governor, Sir Mark Young surrendered Hong Kong to the Japanese. The ceremony was conducted (where else?) in the lobby of The Peninsula. Immediately afterward, Sir Mark was placed under house arrest in Room 336.

Hong Kong’s new governor, Japanese Lt. Gen. Rensuke Isogai, ordered the Rising Sun flag hoisted over The Pen and then turned the hotel into Imperial Japan’s official Hong Kong headquarters–but not before renaming it the “Toa (East Asia) Hotel.”

The Pen’s new name was meant to reflect Imperial Japan’s attempt to create what it called “The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

For almost four years the hotel resonated with the sounds of Japanese. Then, on Aug. 14, 1945, another surrender ceremony was held in The Peninsula. This time, it was Imperial Japan’s turn to capitulate.

[image error]   Japanese Surrender in 1945

In the months immediately following the war, the hotel became a refugee center, with some 2,000 homeless men, women and children packed into its 168 rooms, lobby, and corridors. Many were prisoners repatriated from Japanese POW camps.

When the hotel was finally turned over to the Peninsula Group at the end of 1946 by the British government, they found a building in dire need of repairs. Two feet of water stood in the basement–the result of a street-level hole created by Allied bomb damage. And most of the hotel’s crockery and cutlery had been liberated by the Japanese and the throng of postwar refugees.

By 1947 the hotel had returned to normal operations. And by the early 1950s, it was not only ranked as Asia’s top hotel, but its historic role in the war also had given The Pen a kind of official significance and magisterial stateliness that elevated it to something more than an elegant bivouac for travelers.

The Pen was now, more than ever, a part of Hong Kong lore–a place awash in the ebb and flow of legend and fact. As a result, it attracted a who’s who of writers, from Noel Coward and Eric Ambler to Arthur Miller and Sterling Silliphant.

In the 1960s James Clavell moved in for almost two years and began penning books such as “Noble House,” “Taipan” and “Shogun.”

There was little doubt that the Pen had become the primary magnet for the social, literary and political elite of the region.

That’s the way things continued until the early 1970s when talk of razing the hotel thundered through Hong Kong like a spring typhoon.

It was in this atmosphere that this correspondent first set foot in The Pen’s lobby. You couldn’t have a conversation there in those days without someone commenting on the future of the revered hostelry.

“If they rip the old place down, the owners should be taken out and flogged, by God,” huffed one of The Pen’s aging regulars one evening in the lobby. “It would be a bloody outrage . . . like scuttling the Star Ferry or shearing off the top of Victoria Peak.”

The man, a British businessman, named Thomas Crowell who arrived in Hong Kong in the early 1930s and married a Russian woman born in China, earned his livelihood in the shipping industry. During the war, he was captured by the Japanese and, like thousands of other British POWs, spent almost four years in a POW camp on the island of Hainan.

“I was billeted in The Peninsula after the war with a lot of other chaps from that bloody awful POW camp,” he recalled. “There was no electric, no running water, and nothing coming up from the kitchen. But even if we smelled like hell and cooked beans over Sterno cans in the hallway, it was still The Pen. And it felt like home. And it still does, by God. And I’ll be damned if I’ll let it go without a damned proper scuffle.”

As it turned out, Crowell needn’t have worried.

The global oil crisis and a precipitous drop-off in tourism during the recession-plagued early 1970s combined to scotch plans to raze and rebuild across Salisbury Road. The Pen was saved.

Instead of being razed, the hotel has undergone a series of renovations–the most recent of which ended in 1994 after $200 million was spent to upgrade the hotel’s original 168 rooms and to construct a 30-story tower at the rear of the original building.

[image error]      Remodeled Guest Room

The new tower adds 132 rooms and suites, giving the hotel an even 300. It also adds ten floors of commercial office space and twin helipads on the roof that will ferry guests between the hotel and Hong Kong’s new airport that opened in 1998 on Chep Lap Kok Island some 30 miles away.

The new addition also solves another problem. When The Pen didn’t buy the land across Salisbury Road, somebody else did. Today, just across the road–and blocking the view of the harbor from the hotel’s original seven-story facade–is the Hong Kong Space Museum and Theater.

The chalky geodesic dome-like building seems as out of place along historic Salisbury Road as a Chinese junk on the Mississippi River.

“Rather an eyesore isn’t it,” quipped a British hotel guest standing near the small fountain that fronts The Peninsula. “Looks like a great white wart.”

The Pen’s 132 new tower rooms, which start on the 17th floor, offer unobstructed views over the “wart” across Victoria Harbor to Hong Kong Island. The tower also has a new spa with a 60-foot-long pool, two Jacuzzis, a sun deck overlooking Victoria Harbor, gymnasium and massage salon.

The new rooms–each about 500 square feet–come equipped with Chinese lacquered coffee tables, writing desks, oriental wicker lounge chairs, sofas, silent fax machines, five telephones (three in the room and two in the bathroom), laserdisc/CD players (with individual headphones) and computerized controls in a bedside console for the TV, radio, curtains, air conditioning and lights.

The outdoor temperature and humidity are even displayed on a panel located in each room’s foyer.

The large bathrooms are done in marble and come with a deep bathtub, separate shower stall, private toilet, a TV set housed in the wall above the tub, a regular telephone, and a hands-free telephone.

As opulent as the original Pen’s rooms were, veteran visitors say they don’t come close to the new digs.

“I first stayed here in 1955,” said a guest from London who preferred to give only her first name: Libby. “It was a wonderful ambiance back then. Lots of class. Very nobby. But the rooms today are much nicer. And so is the lobby.”

The lobby should look nicer. Between 1994 and ’95 it underwent a multi-million restoration project. Craftsmen were brought in from England and, working from original blueprints, every plaster figurine, filigree, frieze, fillet, quatrefoil, and flower was cleaned, reconditioned and repainted.

“Absolutely bang on . . . back of the net,” said Libby. “But one wonders about the taste of some of the clientele today. Just look.”

Visitors and guests were wandering through the lobby in the de rigueur travel attire of the today–baggy, knee-length shorts, T-shirts emblazoned with advertising and high-top Reeboks.

“People looking like that would have been turned away at the door back in 1955,” said Libby. “It may be the indulgent and mannerless ‘2000s, but class is timeless. You either have it, or you don’t. And frankly, not many of these people have it.”

Just then a woman in skin-tight canary jogging tights padded into the lobby. Headphones from a portable stereo tape player were clamped to her ears; perspiration dripped from her face, and her running shoes squeaked abrasively against the marble floor as she tramped toward the elevators.

“Isn’t that just perfectly frightful?” Libby said. “I certainly hope she isn’t English.”

She wasn’t. The lady in yellow was French.

“Well, that explains it,” sniffed Libby.

What about those golden days of The Pen back in the 1950s? Any interesting tales to tell?

Libby, now in her late 70s, flashed a wicked smile.

“Now you’ll understand why I don’t want my family name in print,” she said. “I recall sitting in the lobby one night and seeing William Holden sitting alone in the lobby drinking a vodka tonic. So I walked over and introduced myself.

“He was in Hong Kong filming `Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.’ I was an air hostess on holiday. He bought me a vodka tonic, and then another, and then another, and we talked for several hours. It was magical. Then he walked me to my room. And well, that’s as much as you need to know, or I want to say . . . .”

You get the feeling that it was one of those little Asian experiences that could only have happened in the lobby of The Pen.