The Carving of Mount Rushmore
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Read between June 9 - June 27, 2020
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uniformity and isolate him from exposure to the towns and life and even the scenery along his route. And this tourist is but a pale, pampered, and probably (though
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Reading their comments, Calvin Coolidge became mightily displeased. He was the target of this barrage of criticism, but the paragraphs for which he was being criticized were not the paragraphs he had written.
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discontinued.… You can see where your improvements,
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Undaunted by this exchange, Borglum began to carve the edited text into Rushmore’s granite. He had to have done so in the belief that Mr. Coolidge eventually would give in and approve the edited version, because otherwise such carving would have been wasted effort. The Rushmore Act passed by Congress in 1929 clearly stated that the Entablature text was “to be indited by Calvin Coolidge.” Mr. Coolidge, however, was not about to give in.
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Nonetheless, the tempest did escape its teapot, and when it did Calvin Coolidge said he was withdrawing from the unfortunate affair. The Mount Rushmore commission then drafted a resolution asking him to reconsider and submit another text, but to no avail. Coolidge was, he said, washing his hands of the whole thing. He did not, however, forget it. In January of 1931 he was visited at his Massachusetts home by Paul Bellamy, and during their conversation Borglum was mentioned. Whereupon (so this author has heard Bellamy tell it) Mr. Coolidge asked, in his dry New England twang, “About how far ...more
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Coolidge twinkled, took a thoughtful puff on his cigar, and said, “Well … Y’know, Mr. Bellamy, that’s about as close t’ Mr. Borglum as I care t’ be.” Calvin Coolidge died in 1933. So now, in 1934, Borglum felt free to take up the Entablature matter again and to use a different approach to it. His idea now was to hold a national contest offering substantial prizes to those who produced the best Entablature manuscripts, with the grand winner enjoying the honor of seeing his or her composition carved for all eternity in Rushmore’s granite. This, Borglum figured, ought to produce an outstanding ...more
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Borglum took his idea to the Hearst newspaper chain, whose combined circulation exceeded five million and whose founder, William Randolph Hearst, had made much of his fortune from Black Hills gold. To his delight, they bought the idea and a...
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Usually Borglum announced his inspirations the moment he had them. This time, uncharacteristically, he kept quiet until the Hearst organization had accepted and perfected his idea and was about to release the first publicity on it. Then he told the Mount Rushmore commission about it. He thought he had executed a brilliant coup, and it appeared that he had. Hence, the response of the commissioners must have shocked him. They were upset. Powerfully upset. They were no opposed to the Entablature nor to Rushmore publicity, but they were concerned about the legality of what Borglum was doing. The ...more
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At the same time the senator asked his son Harold, who was an attorney, to get an opinion on the matter from the National Park Service lawyers and pass their comments on to John Boland. Soon thereafter, Harold Norbeck reported to Boland that according to the “informal decision” of the Park Service chief attorney, “(a) Coolidge wording must
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be used; (b) The right to change wording does not rest in Congress, as court probably would consider the matter in the same status as a will.” Upon hearing this, Boland tried to get Borglum to drop the contest, but to no avail. Acting for his father, Harold Norbeck then tried to do the same, but only succeeded, he said, in arousing the sculptor’s “resentment and ire.” Next, in a front-page story headed by a four-column cut of men at work on the Washington face, the Hearst papers announced the contest to the nation. This blocked Norbeck, Boland, and the others from continuing their efforts to ...more
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More than forty years later, when Burkett had become a prominent California financier and patron of the arts, he told the author that he owed much of his success to the Rushmore Entablature Contest. As a consequence, he said, he held so deep an affection for the monument that he would like to be buried near it. To his great disappointment, Burkett never saw his words carved on Rushmore, for, a few years later, the Entablature was dropped from the monument plans. He was, however, guest of honor at a 1975 ceremony in which the National Park Service installed in the Rushmore visitors’ center a ...more
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Borglum set the dedication of the Lincoln head for September 17, which was the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution. He planned the ceremony also to be a commemoration of a “roll of honor” of men who had been important to Rushmore and now were dead. In addition to the more familiar names, his list included Dr. C. C. O’Hara, geologist and former president of the South Dakota School of Mines; Joseph Cullinan and Julius Rosenwald, former Rushmore commissioners; Bruce Yates, former general manager of the Homestake Mine, and Senator Coleman DuPont, both of whom had been responsible ...more
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Louella Jones, a willowy beauty, daughter of a South Texas rancher, niece of Commissioner Lorine Spoonts, and soon to become Mrs. Lincoln Borglum. Another was Robert Dean, owner-manager of KOBH, Rapid City’s new (and only) radio station. And yet another was Lynn Brandt, a young NBC announcer who had come to do a network broadcast of the dedication.
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55. NBC announcer Lynn Brandt describing the dedication of the Lincoln head on September 17, 1937. He startled the crowd, and his radio listeners, by announcing that the head of Franklin Roosevelt soon would be carved on the mountain. The dedication was held on a weekday rather than on a weekend and started at the early hour of ten in the morning. It was held at the very tailend of the tourist season, and it included no participants of national prominence. Accordingly, it should have been but lightly attended. In fact, however, just the opposite happened. When the ceremony started, the parking ...more
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Where greatness is promised, history and civilization will never forgive its absence or those responsible for its failure.… This monument has but a single purpose, to borrow a line from Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech: “That these men shall not have lived in vain; that under God the nation they built shall have a new birth of freedom, and that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth!”
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“A perfect dedication,” everyone said later. Everyone, that is, but announcer Brandt, who had gotten his Roosevelts mixed up. “Next to Jefferson,” he had announced, “is an aperture which, in a few years, will reveal the face of our present president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” The crowd, startled, had shouted “No! No!” reported Robert Dean, “and Brandt quickly corrected himself. But the ‘Franklin Delano’ had gone out over the network, and millions of listeners had heard it.”
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Once the Lincoln dedication was out of the way, Borglum turned his energies to other matters. He was now going to bring about some “constructive readjustments,” he wrote to Francis Case. And if Case wondered what the sculptor meant by that, he did not have to wonder very long. For now Borglum began an all-out campaign to get rid of Spotts, Boland, the commission, the Park Service, and his present contract, and to gain for himself the complete control of Rushmore.
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WILLING TO RESIGN ANY TIME … IF PENDING RUSHMORE BILL BECOMES LAW. SUCH RESIGNATION NOT BASED ON UNFOUNDED CHARGES OF SCULPTOR.… COMMISSIONERS WILLINGNESS TO RESIGN REFERRED TO IN YOUR TELEGRAM WAS WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT THIS NATIONAL MEMORIAL BE TURNED OVER TO NATIONAL PARK SERVICE FOR COMPLETION.
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Borglum also had said he would not come back to Rushmore until the situation there had been “corrected,” and he kept that promise, too. He returned in early July, which was after Spotts had gone and Boland’s resignation had become effective. Actually, Boland was still on the job, having been asked to take care of Rushmore’s business affairs until the operation could be reorganized. When Borglum was asked if this was all right with him he said it was and that, in fact, he would be glad to allow Boland “to gasp a little longer, like a trout in the sun.”
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The work was not undertaken by the state but by the Mount Harney Memorial Association, which was a private
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organization. Neither did the state ever accept, or imply that it would accept any financial responsibility for it. ** Actually, Borglum’s visit with Mellon took place about seven months before the 1927 dedication and was not arranged by Coolidge but by Senator Norbeck.
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As things turned out, however, the new arrangement was far less trying for Borglum and the Park Service than either had expected. Under what it called a program of “minimum participation” the Park Service assumed only those powers and duties it was required to assume. It took control of personnel policies, took on the duty of approving expenditures and budgets, and assumed the right to have a voice in the making of contracts. It did not, however, send another Spotts to Rushmore. Instead, it allowed Borglum to keep Lincoln as his superintendent, and because of that the sculptor was to find the ...more
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At the same time, however, Congressman Case had been making an on-the-scene investigation of work in the Hall and in July reported to commission secretary Arundel that: Men were required to work with dry drills in a small space, where fine dust was so thick … that it was impossible for one man to see another a few feet away. This practice is not permitted in mining operations and those who spoke to me about it were sure the men were in danger of contracting silicosis and that future damage claims against the government would result.
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In view of the pledge to the Appropriations Committee this condition should be easy to correct. With that the commission found the courage to act, and work on the Hall was suspended. Intended to be only temporary, the suspension turned out to be permanent, and today the Hall looks exactly as it did when the four o’clock whistle blew on that July day more than forty years ago. On the canyon wall a space that has been smoothed off for the Hall’s entrance facade is pierced by a tunnel that is about twenty feet high and ten wide at the entrance and that grows progressively lower as it proceeds to ...more
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The new assistant was thirty-year-old Korczak Ziolkowski, a great hulk of a man rugged enough to fight bears with a willow switch …...
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orphaned at the age of one, and until the age of sixteen, when he ran away from home, had been raised by an Irish prizefighter. Although he was almost entirely self-educated and self-taught, Ziolkowski’s training had been good enough and his talent great enough that later in this summer of 1939 his bust of Paderewski would win a gold medal at the New York World’s Fair. Emil Flick, Borglum’s ranch manager and moviegoing companion, remembered Ziolkowski’s coming to Rushmore: Mr. Borglum had been in the East on a speaking trip, and when he got back he said, “Emil, I’ve just met a capable young ...more
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Well, the Ziolkowskis dined that night with the Borglums, but they invited Christine and me to come up for supper on the next evening. It was a crude cabin with no running water, and the supper was just a lap-supper. Just the same, when they greeted us Ziolkowski—a most handsome man—was wearing a beautifully embroidered shirt with great flowing sleeves and he had on a white sash, and Mrs. Ziolkowski was wearing an elegant evening gown. He said, “Would you like a drink?” And I say, “You bet!” Well! He started mixing up Manhattans, and after about six shakers of ’em we really were getting ...more
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that told him no matter how much he accomplished it would not be enough. Both being absorbed in the world of sculpture and speaking its special language, they spent a great deal of time together. And, as they did, Korczak was by turns amused, surprised, and impressed by the things he learned about Borglum. He learned, for example, about Borglum’s unusal habit of walking into movie theaters without buying a ticket: We’d had dinner together at the Alex Johnson, and afterwards our wives went off somewhere to shop, so Borglum said, “Korczak, let’s step over to the Elks Theater and see a show.” ...more
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not, for Borglum did not display it nearly as often as he might have): Riding down the mountain one day in Borglum’s limousine with Charlie, his colored chauffeur, driving, Gutzon said, “Korczak, tel...
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“Mr. Borglum, I think they’re magnificent,” I said. “Come now, Korczak,” he said, “nothing is perfect. Surely there must be something I could have done to improve them.” “Really,” I said, “I can’t think of a thing.” But he just kept after me, and said, “Korczak, are you sure?” “We-e-ell,” I said, “maybe you could have turned the heads a little more to the south.” Well! He just glared at me. Then he barked, “Ziolkowski! Why don’t you mind your own goddamn business.” And then he grinned. But the experience that impressed Ziolkowski most and that he still recalled movingly four decades later ...more
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where all that can be seen of the carvings is the profile of Washington standing splendidly against the sky. “Borglum gazed at the profile for a long time. Then he said in a choked sort of voice, ‘Look! Korczak, look! I can’t believe I did that!’ Then he wept.” Unfortunately, this warm association lasted only two months, but brief as it was it would change Ziolkowski’s whole life and ultimately would make him about as well known nationally as Borglum himself. The breakup came on a hot afternoon in August when Ziolkowski was working in the studio and Lincoln Borglum, accompanied by pointer Jim ...more
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who had to restrain his strength when carving lest he shatter the marble, was even more rugged. As a consequence, Lincoln got the worst of it and had to be taken to Custer for minor repairs. Gutzon, who had been away on a trip when this happened, realized when he returned that he would have to let Korczak go. Judging by the letter of dismissal he wrote—a letter so tactful and considerate that until his death 43 years later Ziolkowski kept a photo enlargement of it mounted in his studio—Borglum did not do this in anger nor to avenge his son. After all, being well able to look after himself, ...more
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he had been awarded at the World’s Fair. Then he dropped in at the Players Club, of which Gutzon had long been a member and to which Korczak also belonged. There, as Korczak later recounted it, he fell into conversation with the ancient bartender Hans, who once had been valet to Edwin Booth, the great actor who had founded the Players Club: He asked me what I had been doing, and I said I’d been out in the Black Hills working with Gutzon Borglum. “Ahhh, yes! Mr. Borglum!” Hans said, “a most remarkable and talented man. “I remember when he first became a member here, many years ago. He was kind ...more
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came into the bar and ordered a drink, and when he did Mr. ____ came up to the bar too, and said, ‘I say, young fellow, what is your name?’ (Which, of course, he already knew, but he was leading up to something.) ‘Gutzon Borglum,’ says Mr. Borglum. ‘I’m sorry, how was that again?’ ‘Gut-zon Bor-glum.’ Then Mr. ___ says, ‘I’m sorry and I don’t mean to be rude—uh, Hans, would you make me another drink?—but I still can’t get that name.’ By this time Mr. Borglum is getting pretty irritated, so he says, very distinctly, ’Gut-zon Bor-glum!’ And Mr.___ says, ‘Well, young fella! Gut-zon Bor-glum may ...more
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Following service in World War II, Ziolkowski returned to the Black Hills to stay. He came at the request of a group of Sioux Indians led by Chief Standing Bear, who had asked him to carve on a Black Hills mountain a monument honoring the country’s original occupants. For this purpose, Ziolkowski personally bought, some ten miles southwest of Rushmore, a mountain whose top is a solid granite ridge. There, he began carving a statue of the Sioux war chief Crazy Horse, seated on a pony, and since his death in 1982 the work has been continued by his wife and children. This work is not being done ...more
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control the work—the Crazy Horse project is financed, and therefore controlled, entirely by the Ziolkowskis themselves. In the beginning Korczak paid for it with income from a dairy farm he established for that purpose at the mountain’s base. Now, it is supported entirely from fees paid by sightseeing visitors. At Rushmore a modern water system and plumbing were installed in 1939, and modern toilet facilities were constructed to replace the smelly, old-fashioned outhouses that had served the monument’s visitors until then. At the same time, Borglum put in a modern water system at his ranch, ...more
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service over the studio’s design. Nonetheless, he did have the satisfaction of knowing the studio was being built and soon would be available to replace the overcrowded and overpublic one about which he had been complaining for so long. Meanwhile, Borglum had brought the Roosevelt face to the point where by early summer it was ready for dedication—and in the process had scored another sculptural coup: the carving of Roosevelt’s spectacles. They consist only of a carved nosepiece and a small ridge, suggestive of a frame, striped lightly across each of Roosevelt’s upper cheeks. All the rest, in ...more
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this one, too, was preceded by rain that miraculously cleared away just in time. Held on a Sunday evening, it was by far the best attended of all the Rushmore dedications—about 3,000 cars and 12,000 people—and unquestionably it was the most colorful. The precipitation in its passing had left a sky that was clear and air that was mountain-cool and smelled of rain-freshened earth and pine and stone. Low in the eastern sky there hung a fat moon just one day past full, and above the night-dark forest the gathering crowd could see the great stone faces looming moon-washed and pale against a field ...more
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years before at the ceremony in which South Dakota had become a state. Hart, as his part of the program, made a speech appealing for justice for America’s original citizens—the Indians—and it was a dramatic one for he made it partly in English, partly in Lakotah (Sioux), and partly in Indian sign language. Unfortunately, he talked longer than had been allowed for in the schedule of CBS, which was broadcasting the event, and the announcer found it necessary to cut him off and move to the next part of the program. As Robert Dean described it: At one moment Hart’s voice was echoing out over the ...more
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And then, just as the situation was about to become a real crisis, Louella Jones [Borglum, Lincoln’s wife] rushed up to him, threw here arms about him, and smothered his curses with kisses, saving the day. Richard Dennis sang, and that was dramatic, too, for he sang Irving Berlin’s new song, “God Bless America.” The crowd was moved by that, greatly moved, and Borglum was heard to say, “I have done a lot of things I am proud of, but … I would gladly abandon my sense of accomplishment in all I have done if, by doing it, I could claim authorship of one song, ‘God Bless America.’ Only one in ...more
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and white man greeting each other, a steamboat, a covered wagon, a locomotive, a map of the state, and an American flag. Just when the set-pieces had died away into darkness, a sudden salvo of giant rockets climbed high in the night and exploded into flares that illuminated the Rushmore faces. Then, as the flares settled and died their light was replaced by that from twelve huge floodlights gradually being turned up, and the crowd gasped and murmured with awe. There were speeches (naturally), and in one of them Judge A. R. Denu of Rapid City said:   I hope … America’s Shrine of Democracy will ...more
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We are at the spearhead of a mighty world movement—an awakened force in rebellion against the worn and useless thought of yesterday.… We are reaching deep into the soul of mankind, and through democracy building better than has ever been built before. Even as they spoke, however, that “mighty world movement” was getting ever deeper into trouble, and those world leaders who, unlike Judge Denu, believed that the individual existed only to serve the state were growing steadily more powerful and more dangerous. In August, Hitler and Stalin concluded a “non-aggression pact” that actually was an ...more
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France followed suit. But that was all they did, and Hitler’s troops continued to roll over Poland. On the 17th, the Soviet Union attacked Poland from the east. Ten days later, divided between Hitler and Stalin, Poland had vanished from the map. After Poland, Hitler remained quiet while building up strength for an assault on the West, and the West remained quiet hoping maybe Mr. Hitler would change his mind and settle down. It was a time of false calm called “the phony war” or “the Sitzkrieg,” and it again encouraged both the European democracies and the United States to think perhaps a ...more
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He was furious, too, with the Park Service for insisting that he confine his present efforts to the faces alone. “I know it was their work that stopped all work on the mountain except the heads,” he wrote to Arundel, and added that the Service was engaged in “troublesome sabotage.” Also, the Park Service still was insisting he prepare and submit some sort of organized plans and realistic cost estimates for his work, and he lashed back saying this was an absurd attempt “to apply road-builder practices … or sophomoric engineering to the carving of a great portrait.”
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The members of Congress were confused and divided. Those called “America Firsters” argued that the United States should remain snugly behind its oceans and let Europe fend for itself. One of these was Borglum’s friend Senator Pittman, who declared to the Senate that Great Britain should just retreat to Canada and let Hitler have the British Isles. Others—and more of them every day—agreed with Winston Churchill, who had said: “Upon this battle depends the survival
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of Christian civilization.… If we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age.” Americans, generally, seemed to feel that way also, and a Gallup poll showed seventy-one percent of them in favor of giving Britain some sort of support. There was a growing feeling, too, that the United States had better get prepared to defend itself, and defense was expensive. Accordingly, it was hard to see how Congress now could be expected to give any support, however small, to something as relatively insignificant as the carving of a mountaintop out in ...more
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With the work thus laid out and with Lincoln to supervise it and an experienced crew to perform it, things at the mountain went smoothly through the summer. With one notable exception—the tramway accident. The tramway cage was a wooden structure—“a sort of Chic Sale outhouse without a top,” one workman described it—capable of carrying five or six persons at a time. It was suspended from large pulleys running on a seven-eighths-inch cable stretched from the hoist house on Mount Doane to the A-frame on top of the Roosevelt head some thirteen hundred feet distant and four hundred feet higher. The ...more
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Actually, however, the wheel had been fastened by a set-screw driven through the hub and into the key-seat of the axle. Now, undetected by anyone, the set-screw was working itself loose. There already had been one tramway accident. It had occurred some years earlier, and had it been timed just a little differently it might have cost Rushmore the life of its sculptor. As hoist operator Edwald Hayes recalled it: The Old Man showed up wanting to ride to the top, but I had a load of water cans on the way up already, so he had to wait. Just before the load got to the top, the hoist drive-shaft ...more
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For a while, that incident had put a damper on men riding in the cage, but now it was time-dimmed and half forgotten. Besides, in 1936 Spotts had put an emergency brake on the cage just in case such a thing were to happen again. So … when Gus Schramm, Adolph Valdez, Howdy Peterson, Alfred Johnson, and Norman “Happy” Anderson boarded...
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