One evening I heard that there was a St. Luke’s School of Nursing in Duluth. In time I came up with a phone number and called it and a girl answered. I told her I was with the Air Force and that myself and my buddies wanted to meet some local girls.
There was both joy and hesitancy at the other end. “We are not allowed to date people from the airbase,” I was told. So I asked what about if three of us got together with three of them and we went on a multi-couple picnic on Sunday to Jay Cooke State Park?
She said she’d ask around and then call me back.
One of my friends Dave was from Kansas and just came back from the Aleutian Islands and another Bob, had just come back off a tour serving on “Texas Towers.” These are like oil platforms out in the ocean and those tours were long and lonely. They were friends who also wanted to meet some girls and develop a social life.
The phone call came back, the picnic was on for Sunday.
Well, we stopped at a local store and bought picnic goodies, picked the girls up, and off we went to Jay Cooke State Park. We had a great time, the girl I dated was named Mary, the other girls were Marlis, and Jenny, identical twins.
In time Mary and I married, we had three children, she become a registered nurse in Minnesota, and we have now been married happily for 43 years. I went to work for IBM out east after I was discharged and then was sent to Rochester to work on the design of the IBM S/38.
Bob married Marlis, went to work for AT&T, and had two children and they are still married and living in Minneapolis in good health and spirits.
Dave was transferred to Okinawa after enlisting for another tour of duty and made the Air Force his career.
Duluth was cold in the winter and we were issued arctic gear to wear. Once I was pinned up against a chain-link fence for a good five minutes by wind-gusts whipping off of Lake Superior. An MP with a jeep came and helped me off the fence and into his jeep and dropped me off at the chow hall for a cup of “Minnesota Joe.”
We were told that survival time in Lake Superior was 13 minutes. Brrrr....
]]>Happy New Year to all!!!!
I’m getting back in the saddle again and getting things put into motion. This is one of those projects I’m putting into motion.
I’d also like to pass on an article posted by Deb Hogenson that speaks to this issue as well and provides exactly the core of the problem I have known about since I my days in grad school in urban planning some 6 years ago, namely, social isolation and the non-existence of community.
“The holy blitz rolls on”
The Christian right is a “deeply anti-democratic movement” that gains force by exploiting Americans’ fears, argues Chris Hedges. Salon talks with the former New York Times reporter about his fearless new book, “American Fascists.”
http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/print/book_review_american_fascists_the_holy_blitz_rolls_on
The added benefit of understanding John Dean’s book and the research he used in conjunction with the Salon interview, is to understand the mechanisms that are being used to give these people some identity and a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves and not treated as just a cog in the economic machinery. They GET something from what they are doing that enables them to FEEL like they matter in some intangible way. It is not as much about achieving concrete results as much as having a feeling of hope and a sense of trust.
Anyway, I asked for volunteers who are willing to form a group to begin countering and counter-balancing the right wing extremists. This involves research, discussion, and developing our own material to use in our state and in our communities.
What I have in mind is to develop not only counter arguments, but to use these as material to carry on a “conversation” in the Letters to the Editor section of newspapers ala The Federalist Papers.
Please let me know if you are interested. I already have a couple volunteers, but now that the new year has begun and things loom for this year, I would like to reissue the request and get confirmation on who is willing to work on this.
- Margie A. Hoyt Watonwan Co. A/C
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On 11/6/06, Margie Hoyt wrote:
Dear Brian, Donna, Andy, members of the SCC and the DFL,
It is critically important to heed John Dean’s warning (c-span talk about his book “Conservatives Without Conscience” aired 9/5/06, re-broadcast this morning) about what the right-wing authoritarians are going to do when they lose some seats in this election. They are nothing if not persistent, and when they lose, they re-double their efforts to win the next time.
The “Conservative Movement” which includes Young America’s Foundation that works on college campuses across America has Tim Pawlenty as one of its supporters. In fact, check this out: http://www.minnesotaacademy.com/
With this in mind, and after a much deserved rest and party following the next SCC meeting on Dec. 16th, I want to know what we, the DFL, can do to begin countering YAF and the Conservative Movement in Minnesota. This is NOT an intellectual exercise. This is about developing real strategies and tactics and a serious ground game to counter the authoritarianism at work in the Republican Party and in the religious right that is leading us down the path to totalitarianism that John Dean wrote about in his book.
I hope to hear some thoughts once this election cycle is over.
- Margie A. Hoyt Watonwan Co. A/C
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