MUSIC FOR TODAY

Dave Mallett.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6HtGghqOW4

NOW LET US PRAISE FAMOUS MEN...

 ...and our fathers that begat us -- Ecclesiasticus  44:1

It's not just on Father's Day that I think of and honor these men.  I do it every day of my life because they are part of the fabric of my being.  I have been fortunate enough to have absorbed much of the goodness they have taught me:

Ralph E. House, my father.  The man who taught me honesty, character, integrity, and charity.  The man who taught me that a handshake, freely given, was a bond that should not be broken.  The man how taught me that humor will always conquer anger, and that doing the right thing is always the right thing.  The man who taught me to respect the small things in life and in nature, and to never take them for granted.  Although he has been gone for more than four decades, I remain hopeful that one day I will be half the man he was.

Harold A. Keane, Kitty's father.  Always friendly and almost always cheerful, Harold was a feisty first-generation Irisher, and because he was Irish, he could hold a grudge.  His anger was never directed at a person, but rather to a system.   Because he remembered all too well his early days of "No Irish Need Apply."  He was fiercely opposed to bigotry.  As the proud owner of a Bronze Star, he was also fiercely patriotic and would be saddened when our leaders would put politics over people and expedience over honor.  Harold was also friendly and displayed a great sense of humor.  A child of his time, he ws also completely at sea about how to raise a daughter.  Harold was protective about his family.  He got a great kick out of his grandkids.  I main saddened that he died just weeks before his first great grandson, Mrk, was born, because I know he would have loved him beyond words, and would have been so proud of the man Mark grew up to be.  Harold loved the water and could not be far from a lake or the sea.

Michael T. Dowd, Jessie's husband, who died of a sudden heart attack at age 31 as he was preparing to go golfing.  Perhaps it is crass of me to say it,  but Mike's passing from a heart attack was appropriate because his heart was a big as all outdoors.  He loved Jessie and his two daughters more than anything.  He spent the last night of his life making soap with the girls, and loving every minute of it.  He had a quick wit and a sense of direction that was even worse than Kitty's.  You could never get mad at Mike, even if he did something that appeared bone-headed, because in the next minute, he would do something that showed his innate kindness and caring.  He would have been proud of what Jessie and the girls have done with their lives.  Wherever he is now, he knows they still carry him in his heart.

John Dowd, Michael's father.  John is a lawyer and a damned good one.  His politics are completely opposite from mine and I respect him for that.  John is a proud ex-marine and supports our men and women in service wholeheartedly.  He believes strongly in the code that the Marines had taught him.  He and wife Carol could not have children of their own, so they adopted at different five children of different races who needed a good home -- for that alone he deserves the highest praise.  As a lawyer, he firmly believes in each person's right to have a strong defense, even though much of his work was in defending persons accused of white collar crime, I have to praise his dedication to the principles of law.  He is deceptively smart and has a great sense of humor.  His legal career has brought him to the heights of law in D.C. as a partner in one of the area's most influential law firms; the list of some of his clients is impressive.  John has also been active behind the scenes in Republican politics, and served as one of Donald Trump's lawyers during his first term (his advice to Trump:  Don't ever allow yourself to testify under oath!).  As I said, I do not agree with his politics, but his proven love of family and this country, as well as his strong commitment to integrity places me solidly in his corner.

Walter R. Roof, Jr., Christina's husband.  Like many introverts, Walt is great company and has a cadre of good friends wherever he goes.  Walt is a pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of guy.  when he married Christina he was a high school graduate and she held a degree from George Washington University.  H studied night and online to gain his bachelor's, perfecting his computer skills.  soon he went from working as a cabinet maker and ambulance driver to providing technical assistance the the TSA, eventually to becoming a manager of major computer projects for the Air Force.  (Yeah, we have computers scattered all through the house.)  Walt has many interests and often combines them into small businesses; while studying for his degree and various certifications, he ran a computer consulting company on the side; he combined his skill and love for woodworking into another small business and ended up building small trebuchets; he recently closed down a fifteen-year-old soap making business because it began to interfere with his work for the government.  I don't known what kind of work Walt does for the government, nor do I want to, because if I did know, Walt might just have to kill me.  Currently, Walt has a professional photography business on the side.  Walt is also physically fit, and practices Muay Thai; two years ago he travelled to Thailand to take professional pictures of their world championship.  Through it all, Walt is devoted to Christina.  He instinctively knows exactly what gifts get her.  Often they would pack a lunch and head to the beach to watch the sunset and just spend quiet time together.  Christina has said she married Walt because he makes her laugh; he still does.  And Walt is also a fantastic father, raising three completely different children.  Mark and Erin are out of the house now (although they often come by for advice, or just because), and Walt spends a lot of time now with Jack, guiding him in his special way.  I cannot express the admiration I have for Walt and the things he has done for Christina and the kids.

Walter R. Roof, Sr., Walt's dad.  Senior is a good ol' boy.  He is a friend to everyone and will gladly talk your ear off.  He doesn't have a mean bone in his body.  He and Ellen had been living in Virginia, but  both of them begin to have health problems and we talked them into moving down here so Walt and Christina could be close to them if needed.  Nothing seems to bother Senior; he approaches each day with smile.  Sadly, Ellen's health has deteriorated to the pointed where they will probably have to move in worth us sometime over the next few months.  I know this is a difficult time because Senior is devoted to Ellen,  but I suspect when, and if, they move in Senior will be on first-name terms with neighbors whom Walt and Christina have never met, even though they has lived here for ten years.  And Walt just bought a pool table and moved into the dining room, so Senior will happy as a pig in dirt with a pool table, Ellen, the family, the animals (who he loves), a gazillion neighbors to be fri4nds with, and a weekly Bingo game.  Senior's enthusiasm and zest for life is contagious and I, for one, am happy they moved down here and that I get to spend more time with him.

And I also celebrate Your Father, living or dead.   I may know some of you personally; other I know through on-line friendships; still other I have never met either in person or via the internet.  Even if I do not now you, I am willing to bet you are one hell of a person, because that describes the vast majority of persons on this Earth.  And because you are a hell of of a person, I'm willing to bet that that is, in no small part, because of the influence of your father, and his father before him and his father before him.  We are all the products of a long chain of ancestors who have embedded themselves in our DNA and in our very being.  In honoring those who have helped make you you, I also honor you because, let's face it, you are pretty fantastic.  It is a pleasure to be in your presence as you read my words:  I am completely gobsmacked by your being here.

So, let's raise a glass "to praise famous men" -- to my father, to the fathers who have directly influenced me, and to the fathers who have made you the special person that you are today.  Skoal!

Happy Father's Day!

BEER, VOL. 1, NO. 1 (JUNE 1932)

 A nifty little propaganda magazine put out by Three Star Publishing for the WE WANT BEER ASSOCIATION, INC.  (New York Headquarters:  229 W. 28th St., New York City).

The National Prohibition Act, also known as the Volstead Act, was designed to execute the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the sale of alcoholic drink, and was ratified in January 1919, and brought about the birth of major organized crime, speakeasys, and improperly made, and often poisonous, bootleg liquor.  It was, to say the least, a failed experiment and was finally repealed with the passage of the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933.  Included in the definition of "alcoholic drink" was beer. and therein lies the tale.

This magazine -- I don't know if there was a second issue -- touted the glories, wonders, and beneficial aspects of beer and urged that beer be excluded from the Volstead Act.

Articles, jokes, cartoons, and illustrated were used to hammer down the point.  There is nothing wrong with beer -- it is a healthful, relaxing beverage that should be far distanced from evil rum.  Legalizing beer would not mean a return to saloons and degradation.  It would allow a man to be legally refreshed after coming home from work and sitting in his easy chair with his newspaper.  I would increase the nation's health and economy.  It would restore a basic right.

Several of the article assert the support of various politicians for the return of beer.   Senator Millard E. Tydings is quoted on the economic need for repeal:

• The nation's deficit on June 30, 1931 was $903,000,000
• The last "beer year" indicated a consumption of 1,980,000,000 gallons of beer; a tax of 25 cents per gallon would yield the government some $500,000,000 in revenue
• Add to that coal miners would dig out the 2,990,257 tons of coal needed in the brewing process
• --- the 200,000 freight cars and several hundred locomotives needed to transport the coal to breweries
• --- the 64,000,000 pounds of sugar needed yearly (which might also lessen the likelihood of  civil war in Cuba)
• --- the 3,000,000,000 pounds of wheat need at 4 cents a bushel
• --- and the 300,000 men who would be employed by the breweries
• The deficit would be reduced, at the very least, to a manageable amount.

There is also testimonies from medical men on the positive effect on health.

And sly jabs at the crooks and politicians who have profited from Prohibition.

There is one lone article that makes the case for the entire elimination of the Volstead Act -- not just for the legalization of beer.

Let's face it:  beer is glorious!  It is America's favorite drink.   Americans do not deserve a watered down version that is tasteless and vile:

"Mary had a little Beer.

     It made her feel quite ill.

Said she, "This stuff they sell us now,

     Is rank enough to kill."

So, pull on your propaganda boots, and examine the first (and perhaps only) issue of Beer.  And, as you do so, you may wonder what the WE WANT BEER ASSOCIATION, INC. is doing today.

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=102126

MY JUNETEENTH CREDO

 I AM a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant male just a few months shy of my ninth decade. 

What I am NOT is ignorant or uninformed.  What biases I have are based solely on my ethical makeup, not on ill-chosen ideas of any sort of superiority. 

My belief system is simple.  Everybody deserves a chance,  An opportunity to raise one's family in peace and free from want, with the hope that each generation will have things better than the one before.  On June 19, 1865, that opportunity became closer to the grasp of all Americans.

Juneteenth is one of the most important holidays we have.  It symbolizes the hopes and dreams all Americans have as we continue to strive toward a more perfect nation.  Let us never lose sight of that.

We are all in the same boat.  If there are a few who would rock the boat, attempt to overturn or sink it, it is our sacred obligation to resist them with all our might.

FORGOTTEN BOOK: WHEN THE WIND BLOWS

When the Wind Blows by John Saul, 1981

When the Wind Blows is an early John Saul book, his fifth horror novel published under his own name.  It has the basic theme that made him an author with thirty-one best-selling novels:  children in danger.  The children may be young, or may be teenagers, but they always have some fantastic or supernatural force trying to destroy them, with innocent bystanders also suffering; at times, these children may also be the source of evil in the books.  Saul's variations on this theme have led to a long, sustained career.

The scene here is the small town of Amberton, nestled in the Colorado Rockies.  Unlike other mining towns, Amberton had no gold or silver, but it did have a large amount of coal, the  mining of which provided the lifeblood of the town.  Unique to the town was its chinook winds, heavy, blustering gusts that swam down from the mountains at frequent and unpredictable times.  And when the winds blew, the cries of children could be heard.  Supposedly these were the cries of stillborn Indian children well over a century old; the natives would take the bodies of these stillborn infants to a cave where they would await their chance to be reborn and to experience life for the first time.  Of course, this was just  a superstition; the white population of the town refused to believe it.  Nevertheless, when the winds blew, bad things happened.

The winds were blowing fifty years before the main events of the novel.  Dozens of miners. including mine owner Amos Amber, were deep in the mine when a wall let go and a torrent of water appeared, flooding the mine and killing all those below.  Supposedly the miners had heard the cries of the children above the roar of the winds.  At the same time the mine was destroyed, Amos amber's wife, Edna, went into labor with a child she never wanted.  Edna, too, heard the wind and the cries of the children.

Now fifty years have passed and Edna is a bitter, mean-spirited, cruel, and selfish woman, living on the fading Amber ranch with her only child, Diana.  Diana has been terrorized her entire life by her  mother, who views Diana as mere chattel, someone to come at her every beck and call.  in many ways Edna a has infantilized her daughter, never allowing her to grow up and mature into a full adult.  Diana has severe memory lapses, usually when the wind blows; chunks of her life are gone and Diana does  not even realize it.  And Diana has a horrific secret that she has completely blocked from her life.  Both Edna and Diana are reclusive, so the townspeople do not realize that each is insane.

Fifty years after the tragedy that closed down the mine and brought the town to financial ruin, Diana decides to reopen the mine.  She places mining engineer Elliott Lyons, a widower with a nine-year-old daughter, in charge of the project.  Lyons, a capable and careful man, never allowed anyone to go into the mine alone because of the potential danger.  Nevertheless, when the wind was blowing, Lyons entered the mine by himself, fell into a large pit, and was killed.  His daughter, Chrissie, having no other relatives, was brought to live with Diana for the time being.  Diana, never having fully matured, nevertheless desperately wanted to have a child and she decided that Chrissie was that child; in her mind, Diana became Chrissie's mother and began to infantilize her as Edna had once done to Diana.  Edna resents Diana's attention on Chrissie and begins to plot ways to get the young girl out of the house, one way or another...

What we have, in effect, is a good old-fashioned Southern Gothic, albeit set in the Rockies with supernatural elements.

Other players in this tragedy are Bill Henry, the local doctor who grew up with Diana and once was in love with her; over the year, that love morphed into mere affection and concern.  Dan Gurley, the local sheriff, dislikes the suspicious thoughts he has about the Amber women.  Esperanza Rodigues is the half-breed housekeepers for the Ambers; she is steeped in the superstitious beliefs of her people.  When Esperanza's son, Juan, was born severely defective. her people wanted her to take the baby to the cave where the stillborn children -- the water babies -- had been placed and leave him there to die; Espernza refused because her son was not stillborn, and insisted on rising him herself.  And then there were the children of the town -- Jeff, Kim, Steve, Jay-Jay, and Eddie -- all friends of Chrissie and her same age.  These children goad one another into doing risky things, and some of them will die.

There's violence, both psychological and physical, but the worst violence is strangely not described viscerally.  The unravelling of Edna and Diana and the slow display of their insanities is done well.  Some minor threads are never explained but the break-neck pace at the end of the books allows the reader to forget about  both them and various plot holes until long after the novel is put down.

There is an unexpected and horrifying coup de grace revealed in the book's final paragraph.

All in all, an effective horror novel with many unexplained parts.  An interesting but uncomfortable read because of the child abuse.  But child abuse, and the threat of child abuse, is a large part of what made Saul's books sell. I have to wonder, though, is this just a literary gimmick?  Or does Saul truly not like children.

Saul (born 1942 and still living) has not published a book since 2009.  His long-time partner of more than fifty year (and now husband) has anonymously collaborated on several of Saul's novels.  Before Suffer the Children, the first novel published under his own name, Saul had written about ten other novels published under pseudonyms.  Saul is also the author of a number of one-act plays.  In 2023, he received the Bram Stoker Ward from the Horror Writers Association for Lifetime Achievement.

MYSTERY IN THE AIR: THE BLACK CAT (SEPTEMBER 18, 1947)

Mystery in the Air was a summer replacement program for the Abbott and Costello Show  beginning in 1945.  Rather than yucks, this show went for crime and mystery, beginning with a crime series about Detective Stonewall Scott.  Then, in 1947, it switched gears and for eight episodes it became a horror anthology series hosted by Peter Lorre and announced by Harry Morgan (he of Dragnet and M.A.S.H.) fame), airing such classic stories as "The Lodger" and "The Horla."

Edgar Allan Poe got his turn with 'The Black Cat,." starring Lorre himself in an over-the-top and effective performance.

Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKXqzCxRGow

SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: SLAY RIDE TO ETERNITY

 "Slay Ride to Eternity" by Tedd Thomey  (first published in the Australian edition of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, May 1957; then reprinted in the American edition of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, June 1957, followed by the United Kingdom edition of the magazine, September 1957; reprinted in the British paperback anthology Crime Squad, 1968, purportedly edited -- as one of four such anthologies -- by "Ed McBain" [Evan Hunter] -- and perhaps it actually was)

Jim Holt is an oil rigging worker just returned from Saudi Arabia.  On the journey back to the States, he had the misfortune to get into a game of craps in which he lost all the  money he had saved.  Now broke, he ran into Bill Tropp, a man he had worked with in the oil field in nearby Signal Hill two years earlier; Tropp lent him five bucks to tide him over and, more importantly, introduced him to Vern Stickle, who then hired him to work as a pipe racker on one of his wells.  Holt remembers getting into Stickle's car, and then...nothing.

Holt woke up sore, confused, and unable to move.  Slowly he realized that he was lying on the floor of an old derrick.  Barely opening his eyes, he saw Stickle in the distance arguing with two people, a tall man and a young woman.  The tall man grabbed Stickle and dragged him to working derrick; the woman saying, "You can't back out now!  If you had been more careful two years ago..."  The tall man pinned Stickle to the floor of the derrick and held him as the derrick's heavy counterweight came don like a hammer, crushing Stickle's skull.  Holt was horrified but still unable to move.  The woman took Stickle's cracked, bloody glasses and placed them in Holt's hand; then she threw the glasses into the distance where authorities would find them.  Holt -- still immobile -- could feel the woman searching his pockets.  He was then lifted and thrown into the back seat of Stickle's car.  Holt was slowly getting control of his body back as the pair plotted to drive the car, with Holt, off a cliff.  He suddenly recognized the voice of the tall man:  Vic Emerson, who had been one of his bosses two years before.

Holt managed enough control of his body to open the car door and drop out onto the side of the road.  He began to slide down the cliff, slowly at first, then rolling uncontrollably until he slammed kinto a shed at the bottom of the cliff.  Badly damaged, again he found himself unable to move as Emerson and the girl inched their way down the mountainside toward him.  The headlights of an oncoming car stopped them and they scurried back to the top and drove off in Stickler's car.  Holt eventually got control of his body enough to get up and stumble toward a building in the distance, whose lights proclaimed it to be a bar.  There he could call the police.  Then Holt checked his pockets.  He had Stickler's wallet filled with cash, in addition to Stickler's distinctive ring and watch.  Holt was being set up.  He did not know why Stickler was murdered, why he was being framed, or who the mysterious woman was.  He did not dare call the police.  Could things get any worse.  Of course they could.  Holt decided to talk to Bill Tropp, who had also worked with Emerson to years before.  Maybe Tropp could give him some information about Emerson.  Bur when Holt got to Tropp's home, the door was open and Tropp lay dead, stabbed with a knife.  on the wall was a crimson message:  HOLT STAB M.  then Tropp's wife came, screaming...

Holt also learned that he had supposedly died two years before in an explosion that killed two other people, a blast that reduced all three bodies to jelly,  An accident supposedly caused by Holt.

A murder scheme from two years before could have unraveled merely because Jim Holt returned to the area from the Arabian oil fields.  But how to prove it?  The evidence against Holt in the murders of Stickler and Tropp was overwhelming.

A fast-paced, doom-laden story worthy of Cornell Woolrich at his pulpiest.

Tedd Thomey (1920-2008 -- "the second 'd' in Tedd was an affectation, added by a young man hoping to be noticed") published more than half a hundred crime and detective stories in the pulps and digest from the late 1940s through  the 1950s.  He wrote a  number of crime novels, mainly paperback originals, including Killer in White , And Dream of Evil, and Flight to Tokla-Ma.  His biggest-selling book appears to an "as told to" written for Mrs. Florence Addland, The Big Love, detailing her teen-age daughter Beverly's sexual relationship with actor Errol Flynn -- a huge scandal in its day.

The June 1957 issue of Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine can be read online at the Luminist Archive.