This is the first in a series of blog posts about my great-great uncle Richard T. Board, the uncle of my already infamous grandfather William Lyons Board. Many thanks to my friend Tessa Bishop Hoggard for discovering yet another curiously dissipated ancestor of mine. It is only because of her extensive research that I am able to share these startling stories with you. The Republicans were outraged. Couldn’t this administration appoint any officials who weren’t already corrupt or proven criminals? Grover Cleveland, the newly elected president, was the first Democrat to sit in the White House since the Civil War, and newspapers across the country railed against his inept hiring practices. The St. Albans [Vermont] Weekly Messenger repeated what was evidently a common refrain: “Another jail bird appointed to office by the democratic administration.” The article goes on to say that soon after Richard Board, age 25, was appointed clerk for the Rincon to Deming, N.M., route of the U.S. Railway Mail Service, prominent citizens in his hometown, Harrodsburg, Ky., notified the federal government that “Board was under three indictments for forgery, and had been three times arrested in Cincinnati for getting money under false pretense, once in Texas for robbery and twice for theft in Kentucky.” I have not been able to corroborate all these claims. Nonetheless, how on earth had young Richard Board gotten this plum assignment in the 15-year-old Railway Mail Service? Richard T. Board Jr. was the eldest of three sons of Richard T. Board Sr., the highly respected longtime circuit clerk in Mercer County, Ky. (county seat, Harrodsburg). The son had worked as the deputy clerk to his father for at least a couple of years. Richard Board Sr. was well known among Kentucky’s political powerbrokers. The First Comptroller of the Treasury in the Cleveland administration was Hon. Milton J. Durham, a native of Danville, Ky., one county south of Mercer. Durham had evidently sponsored Board’s appointment upon the recommendation of Kentucky’s Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Blackburn (younger brother of Kentucky Governor Luke Blackburn, whose term had ended in 1883). It probably didn’t hurt that the assistant postmaster general during the Cleveland administration was Adlai Stevenson, a Kentucky native who evidently was eager to fire Republican postal workers and replace them with Southern Democrats. This was the machine behind young Richard’s federal appointment. Somewhere along the way, no one bothered to ask about his character. Two weeks after Board was named to the post, Comptroller Durham, according to the St. Albans newspaper, “got a lively letter from a friend in Kentucky, reciting Board’s criminal record in full. The letter concludes with the prediction that Board would steal something before he had been in the service a month. The prediction was fulfilled. Before the warning note was written Board had stolen a money order for $163.” Board had been appointed to the position on July 7, 1885, dismissed on July 30, and, on August 17, was arrested in St. Louis where he previously had been living with his wife of eight months, Fannie Mace. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat claimed he had illegally used his Railway Mail Service transportation card to travel back to Missouri after his dismissal. Board was unable to pay the $1,500 bail and was remanded to jail in St. Louis. After being transferred to a Santa Fe jail, he stood trial in Socorro, N.M., in March 1886 and was found guilty of robbing a registered letter from a train heading to Santa Fe. Never one to blame himself for his misfortunes, Board evidently claimed, and The Sierra County Advocate of Kingston, N.M., reported, that “His downfall [was] attributed to an immoral female.” After the trial, federal marshals brought Board back to St. Louis and he was delivered to Southern Illinois Penitentiary at Chester (now Menard Correctional Center), 60 miles southeast of St. Louis, to serve a two-and-a-half-year term. On February 7, 1888, while his oldest son was still in prison, Richard T. Board Sr. died of a paralytic stroke at age 62. According to the Stanford, Ky., Interior Journal, he had been “on the street apparently well an hour before.” Newspaper documentation shows that Richard T. Board Jr. had indeed been arrested multiple times for forgery and theft before he was incarcerated in Illinois. Reports indicated that his father had done all he could to honor his son’s debts and rescue him from his scrapes with the law. In September 1883, records show Richard Board Jr. had been arrested in Cincinnati for forging his father's name to a check at the National Saloon. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, “In his pocket was found a touching letter from his brother in Harrodsburg, Ky., begging him for the sake of his folks to behave himself.” That brother would be my great-grandfather, William Ellery Board, father of William Lyons Board. A few months later, in January 1884—while working as a bookkeeper in St. Louis, a few months before marrying Fannie—Board passed a false $10 check written on a Harrodsburg bank to the Pacific Express Company. In lieu of an $800 bond, he went to jail. I can only assume that Richard Board Jr. returned to his wife in St. Louis after he was released from prison on May 4, 1888. By June 1892, however, Fannie had filed for a divorce from Richard Board, accusing him of “brutality and general indignities,” according to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. By then, Board was already gone. On April 30, 1892, at 31 years old, he had enlisted as a private in the Army and was stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco. Richard Board Jr. had landed in the wild west, and he would spend the next 25 years wreaking havoc up and down the coast, leaving tragedy in his wake.
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On February 23, 1900, Rep. George Henry White (R-N.C.), the sole Black U.S. lawmaker at the time, gave an impassioned speech on the House floor about the antilynching legislation he was proposing. The bill would make mob violence that resulted in the victim’s death a federal crime of treason to be tried in U.S. courts. White had felt compelled to act after witnessing the bloody Wilmington, N.C., race riot a little over a year before, during which a mob of white locals toppled the city’s multiracial government and ruthlessly murdered an estimated 60 innocent Black citizens. After White’s speech, his fellow congressmen applauded his words but failed to pass the bill out of committee. Thirty-five years after the Civil War, Southern devotion to states’ rights was still paramount. White called out some of his colleagues who had spoken against heinous lynchings in their own communities. In White’s view, these legislators would not countenance federal legislation because “this would not have accomplished the purpose of riveting public sentiment upon every colored man of the South as a rapist from whose brutal assaults every white woman must be protected.” [Washington Post, February 21, 2020] A year later, on February 11, 1901, a determined mob of local townsmen hung George Carter in front of the Bourbon County Courthouse in Paris, Ky. His crime? According to news reports: an attempted purse snatching. According to rumor and innuendo: rape. The woman George Carter allegedly accosted was my great-grandmother, Mary Lake Board. The eight-year-old boy who identified Carter as his mother’s assailant was my maternal grandfather, William Lyons Board. There are reasons to question whether George Carter was indeed the man who assaulted my great-grandmother. There was no trial, no presentation of evidence. There was almost certainly no capital crime. In her book In the Courthouse’s Shadow: The Lynching of George Carter in Paris, Kentucky, Paris native Tessa Bishop Hoggard scrutinizes the contemporaneous documentation and then offers a riveting account of the lead-up to the encounter with my great-grandmother and its chilling aftermath. The hanging also plays a pivotal role in the novel I wrote about my grandfather, Next Train Out. Of course, no one in that Paris, Ky., mob was ever identified or arrested. No one was charged or convicted of murdering George Carter. There was no federal hate crime or antilynching law on the books, because Congress had failed to act the year before. It was not until 1920 that “Kentucky became the first southern state to pass an antilynching law.” [John D. Wright Jr., “Lexington’s Suppression of the 1920 Will Lockett Lynch Mob,” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 84, no. 3 (1986): 263-79.] This month, 122 years later, after 200 failed attempts, Congress finally succeeded in passing the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, named in honor of the 14-year-old boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955. After President Biden signs the bill into law, a lynching resulting in death or serious bodily injury can be prosecuted as a federal hate crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison. It’s too late for George Carter, of course, or for the estimated 2,000 people who were lynched in this country after White’s original bill failed. But perhaps it’s a sign that our nation’s citizens are finally ready to take some initial steps toward ensuring justice prevails when racial hate crimes are committed. Just last month a Georgia jury found the three white men involved in Ahmaud Arbery’s murder guilty of federal hate crimes. The next day the three Minneapolis police officers who remained inert as Derek Chauvin slowly killed George Floyd were all found guilty of violating Floyd’s civil rights. It may feel like way too little way too late, but perhaps we can sense a slight rebalancing of the scales of justice. Perhaps we are moving at a snail’s pace toward that more perfect union where all men and women truly are created equal. Despite current efforts in statehouses across the country to restrict discussions of our nation’s documented history relating to racial injustice and oppression, perhaps these concrete actions are signs of movement in the opposite direction, toward transparency and a more honest reckoning of our past. We all need to feel uncomfortable about the atrocities that have been committed in this nation to buttress unequal power structures. We need to feel shame. And then we need to take action to address the lingering institutions and sentiments that perpetuate these injustices. Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill, the longtime champion of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, said after the bill passed: “Lynching is a longstanding and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy…. [This bill] sends a clear and emphatic message that our nation will no longer ignore this shameful chapter of our history and that the full force of the U.S. federal government will always be brought to bear against those who commit this heinous act.” [NPR, March 7, 2022] Bill signedOn Tuesday, March 29, 2022, President Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. Till’s cousin, Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., the last living witness to his abduction, said in response, “Laws make you behave better, but they cannot legislate the heart.” Let’s hope the hearts of all Americans are slowly recognizing the injustices that have stained our nation since its inception. eventOn Saturday, March 26, 2022, Tessa Bishop Hoggard and I participated in a Zoom virtual conversation hosted by the Paris, Ky., Hopewell Museum. We discussed the 1901 lynching of George Carter and how that dark episode prompted both of us to write our books. Connecting with Tessa ultimately led to my friendship with George Carter’s great-nephew, Jim Bannister. Joe Ford, of Louisville, Ky., responds to Reunion on the Rocks with some reflections of his own. If you would like to submit a post to Clearing the Fog, please contact us here. It occurs to me that I spent my winter in three pursuits: 1. Contemplating, from an evolutionary standpoint, why my hair is migrating from the top of my head to my ears and nose. What’s up with that? 2. Worrying about spontaneous human combustion. It’s a thing, apparently. 3. Hmmm… ummm… wait, wait… uh, oh darn, I can’t remember. It will come back to me. Sallie’s recent post reminded me that, instead, I could have been stumbling along the trails in the Red River Gorge and adjacent Clifty Wilderness. My family has spent a lot of time there camping in the milder months, mostly at Koomer Ridge or Whittleton. In the winter we retreated to the cabins at Natural Bridge, snuggling up before the fireplace after a winter hike. Derby weekend was our favorite time to head to the hills: no school activities, no violin recitals, no social requirements. It was easy for us to get away, as it was for my daughter’s friends and their families who followed us down. Everyone brought something for communal use. Pity the newcomers who signed up to bring cups. You have not seen indecision until you’ve seen a newly environmentally conscious parent standing in Kroger trying to decide between the red plastic cups and the Styrofoam cups. (Will the other parents judge me? Will the kids ostracize my child? Where the hell are those tiny little paper Dixie cups?) Soon they would learn, as we had: bring all your mugs from home and take them back with you. Once a family from India was assigned to bring the makings of s’mores. You know, graham crackers, Hershey bars, marshmallows. Delivered as ordered: graham animal crackers, mini-bite Hershey bars, and tiny hot chocolate marshmallows. Derby weekend was also a perfect time to be in the woods: the wildflowers were out in droves, and our favorite trails sheltered their treasured jack-in-the-pulpits and pink lady slippers. And if you saw a yellow one, well, the angels must have noticed what a bad week you’d had. Perhaps Jim and Jeff and Sallie and Greg and Walter and Bob and Bob would let me tag along. I hope to have more time soon. As you may have surmised from my enumerated winter pursuits above, I am sort of on a glide path to retirement. Not quite 65, but I recently quit my long-time corporate jobs and took a pay cut to help with a small business run by my brother as he brought it out of the pandemic shutdown. For those readers contemplating a similar move, let me counsel you to learn from my mistakes (revealed in that little paragraph above). I am not a math or accounting major, so it took me by surprise when the seemingly innocuous idea of accepting a salary cut turned into less money actually being deposited in my bank account each week. I mean, who knew? So when I finally, gulp, step down to zero income and full retirement, maybe I can hike with you guys. I expect I’ll be feeling lost and confused. You, the experienced hikers and retirees, can nudge me in the right direction, down the trail and on through the next stage of life. My father, the rule-follower. At least now I know where I get it. “It will always be a source of regret to me that I followed Army regulations and failed to keep a diary of my days in Europe from Jan 1945 to June 1946.” Pud wrote that in the Preface to the journal he started well after the war, in February 1953, while employed as a research associate at Harvard Forest in Petersham, Mass. Though this journal focuses on his efforts to complete his doctoral dissertation, his interactions with other scientists and their research projects, and his introduction to academic and work-life politics, he is nonetheless just a few years removed from his march across Europe as a lieutenant in Patton’s army. Every now and then, wartime memories would interrupt his typical journal remarks about New England weather or frost heaves, with no elaboration. The specific horrors or searing experiences that prompted a terse reference were not permitted to stain these pages. For example, here is how he opened his post on 31 March 1953: Eight years ago about this time I was crossing the Rhine at Mainz. This afternoon about 1600 the sun broke out and stayed until sunset. We’ve had about a week of lousy weather—rain or cool and cloudy. Rain gauge showed almost 3 in. for last week. Worcester had 8 in. rain in March—more than any March since 1936, the year of disastrous floods. Last weekend the Conn. and Saco Rivers were on the rampage. … After crossing the Rhine to Frankfurt, Pud and his unit would follow Germany’s 6th Infantry Division east to Mühlhausen, south to Erfurt, through the Thüringer Wald to the Danube at Regensburg, and eventually on to Austria. They encountered increasingly demoralized enemy forces and human atrocities unlike any the modern world had seen. My father witnessed all of this first-hand. As an intelligence staff officer and a battalion S2, Pud was responsible for relaying to his commander the threat that lay just ahead: the number of and preparation of the enemy forces, the terrain and battlefield conditions, and the risks to a successful completion of the mission. The accuracy of his assessment and the clarity of his communication could save—or cost—American lives. Amid the chaos of war, the Allied forces had one goal: the defeat of Hitler and the forces he had aligned behind the Nazis. The enemy was so clear, the purpose so important, that young American men, including members of my family, eagerly volunteered to fight, sometimes before they were of legal age to join the military. I recall this family history, of course, as Vladimir Putin sends Russian forces westward into Ukraine. Putin has his own reasons for this aggression, claiming, falsely, that the democratically elected Ukrainian government grabbed power illegitimately. Putin wants us to believe he is fighting the Nazis--“like 80 years ago.” He is not. But he believes that he can win support among Russian people if he resurrects the horror inflicted on millions of Russians during the Second World War. The Nazis were the clear enemy then, so they will be a convenient enemy now. We have all seen the rising influence of Nazi sympathies in recent years. It is a cancer that seems to metastasize unchecked in dim corners of civilized society. I expect Ukraine, like most Western countries, has some number of Nazi sympathizers. It is not, however, a nation ruled by Nazis. Our parents and grandparents fought the evil that was Nazism. As did the parents and grandparents of Russian citizens. And Ukrainian citizens. Putin’s forces today are not fighting Nazism. They have been conscripted to fight Putin’s war to realize his fever dream of an expanded Russian state. It is Putin who is using Nazi tactics like disinformation and a nationalistic love for the motherland to further his own totalitarian ambitions. We see this clearly. We ache for the Ukrainian and the Russian citizens; the refugees and the nations that have opened their arms to them; the Russian soldiers who are being sent to fight their neighbors and their family members; the Ukrainian forces that are withstanding the assault of a larger, better equipped opponent; the Ukrainian citizens who are fighting back in the streets; the Ukrainian officials who are standing strong in the face of mortal threat and the physical destruction of their cities and their homes. Experts tell us this tragedy is still in its opening act. It’s hard to know how it will play out. We can only hope, once again, that the rest of the world can find the courage to stop a madman. When I graduated from Anderson County High School in 1977, I intended to leave Lawrenceburg (Ky.) behind and never look back. I didn’t want to attend the actual graduation ceremony, but my mother made me. I refused to get a new dress (to wear under the gown?) or the required white sandals (when would I ever wear those again?). So, over and over, I clopped across the stage in that hot high school gym wearing my worn Dr. Scholl’s, the rubber long gone from the bottom of the wooden footbed, as I was unexpectedly called to accept a number of awards. My mother was mortified. She told me later that she overheard people around her whispering, “That poor little girl. Her family obviously couldn’t afford a new pair of shoes. Isn’t it wonderful that she’s receiving these scholarships?” Afterwards, backstage, I remember looking around at my classmates as they hugged and cried and laughed. I felt nothing. No one approached me and I didn’t see anyone I wanted to say goodbye to. It all seemed completely hollow. I just wanted to get home and get on with my life. Eventually, I did go back, of course, but it took me nearly 40 years. When David Hoefer and I started compiling The Last Resort, I spent a lot of time around Anderson County imagining the area in the 1940s, visiting my dad’s old camp on Salt River, and talking to the few people who still remembered him. I brought a different perspective this time, and a purpose. I was interested—fascinated, as it turned out—by my family’s long history in the area, which I had long ignored. And then this winter, by another stroke of sublime serendipity—or perhaps cosmic payback—I’ve found myself thrown together with a motley group of boys who also graduated from Anderson County High School in the 1970s. I suppose it started with our pilgrimage to Panther Rock in November 2020. My cousin Jim McWilliams had been told I knew the owner of the property and could get us access. When Jim contacted me, he mentioned that he and his friend (and my former classmate) Jeff Lee wanted to revisit a site they had hiked many times as youngsters. The three of us soon realized we were always up for a walk in the woods. When Jim and Jeff began to hike the Red River Gorge area with friends Greg Hood and Walter Moffett this past fall, I somehow wheedled an invitation to tag along. Others have joined us at times: my cousin Bob McWilliams; another classmate, Bob Cox; another of Jim’s classmates whom I knew from band, Kelly Rose; Barry Puhr, son of one of my mother’s good friends. All Anderson County graduates. All fellas I either knew or knew about when I was in school. All with completely different life histories and distinct talents. All now joined together, decades later, by our love of being in the woods. At the end of my high school years, I looked around and thought I had nothing in common with the people surrounding me. I had no idea how to talk to them. I had never felt that I fit in. And now, 45 years later, I eagerly look forward to spending time with this gang of intrepid trekkers. Our careers are behind us. We’ve set aside our professional personas and the roles we played for decades to meet society’s demands. Now we’re just a group of comrades who can’t wait to get back on the trail. Tornadoes. Floods. Mud slides. Ice storms. Kentucky has endured its share of catastrophic weather in the past two months. This week, it was Winter Storm Landon striking some of the same areas of Western Kentucky devastated by the December 10 tornadoes and then moving into north central Kentucky. Throughout the commonwealth, homeowners prepared for potential widespread and lengthy power outages. Many of us had flashbacks to 2009 when a devastating ice storm left more than half a million Kentucky homes and businesses without power for a week or more. Thankfully, Landon didn’t land quite the same punch. Here in Scott County we were, once again, largely spared. We spent a day waiting for the ice to accumulate and the lights to flicker, but by nightfall we were beginning to breathe a little easier. Snow and a bitter wind continued into the next day as temperatures dropped into the teens. And then, late this afternoon, the sun came out. I pulled on some warm clothes and headed out with the dog. I walked to the top of the hill…and found myself in a magical crystal kingdom. The sun was backlighting the patches of woodland trees that dot the neighborhood, each limb and twig still fully encased in ice. The reflected light was blinding. Prismatic color—pink, green, yellow, blue—sparkled and bounced in a happy jig. It seemed someone had draped the trees with thousands of the tiniest twinkling Christmas lights. A photo couldn’t do it justice, and it saddens me that I couldn’t find a way to share it with you other than through my feeble words. It has already been a challenging winter. Record-breaking storms have battered numerous areas of the country. The omicron variant has sent many of us back to our safe rooms. Friends and relatives have lost loved ones—too many loved ones. I fear what the rest of the year has to offer. But, for an hour, Lucy and I walked amid the sparkling trees beneath the blue sky, completely enraptured by the scene around us. These are the moments I will pocket for now and pull out when I need reassurance of better days ahead. Scenes from winter storm landonWinter Storm Kenan January 28, 2022When I was a sophomore in high school, my mother decided for a number of complicated reasons to send me to a boarding school in Virginia. Nestled at the base of a mountain in the Shenandoah Valley, it was the perfect place for me. I could canoe, camp, ride horses, play tennis, and even join a synchronized swimming team. Classes were tiny: typically five or six students, maybe 12 in my biggest class. We got to know our teachers personally. After overcoming initial loneliness, I made some friends by the end of the year. Sadly, that was the last year the school, which had been in operation for nearly 100 years, was financially able to stay open. A number of my classmates chose to attend similar schools in the area. For some reason, inexplicable to me now, I decided to try something completely different: a large urban school in the swanky north end of Atlanta that accepted only a few boarders, largely international students. It was an academically competitive school, and I devoted hours every night to homework, rarely finishing before the wee hours of the morning. The Southern norms and mores mystified me. I joined the marching band and the volleyball team, but otherwise completely isolated myself. I was miserable. I became anorexic, starving myself both to avoid solitary meals in the cafeteria and in a vain attempt to exert some control over an immensely painful situation. When I dropped to 82 pounds, even the women who cleaned the dorm were asking me about my health, expressing genuine concern. I batted away their inquiries. At my previous school, I couldn’t avoid knowing that a number of the girls purged after meals. One in particular, a friend of mine whose room was across the hall, was a competitive figure skater from Wisconsin. She didn’t come back the second semester, and I heard through the grapevine that alcohol and bulimia had landed her in the hospital. The public was just becoming aware of eating disorders and their toll on young women and their families, but I couldn’t imagine myself falling victim to such self-abuse. Then my circumstances changed. My dad’s first cousin, Joe Moore, lived in Atlanta, and he and his wife, Jean, periodically brought me to their house or took me sightseeing around the city. They gave me a taste of normalcy. I was deeply grateful to them for taking me in when I most needed to feel welcome somewhere. I doubt I was able to express at the time what their kindness meant to me. At Christmastime that year, my mother recognized the severity of my illness and didn’t let me return to Atlanta. With her quiet, non-pushy supervision, comfortable in my own home, my health improved. A few years ago, my cousin Sandy Goodlett helped me reconnect with Joe, his brother, John Allen, and their sister, Jane. We made a couple of trips to Atlanta and Owensboro, Ky., and relished the family stories they could share with us. Having lost my father at a very young age, I was always thirsty for details about my dad from those who knew him best. On Sunday, January 9, Joe’s wife, Jean, died of complications from Covid and increasing dementia. She was fully vaccinated but still vulnerable at 83. As I work through my own sadness, I realize it’s tied to the kindness she extended to me in a time of real distress. A new year, more time to grieve. This virus is not done with us. We’re still losing more than a thousand Americans each day. Each victim leaves behind a loving family and friends. We know this. It sounds trite. But we should not forget it. We should not get complacent. And we should not decide it’s OK to sacrifice the aged and the vulnerable so we can blithely go about our lives without disruption. We must take the simple steps that we can to limit the virus’s spread: get vaccinated and boosted, wear a mask, avoid large crowds. That is not asking too much. Joe Anthony, of Lexington, Ky., wonders whether Americans have what it takes to defeat our 21st-century enemy. If you would like to submit a post to Clearing the Fog, please contact us here. During the 1940s, do you think our parents and grandparents would sometimes complain to each other? “I’m so tired of news about the war. Can’t we talk about something besides the Pacific Front or Allied landings?” I’m sure they did, occasionally, but they knew the war was center stage. Covid is our war. It doesn’t matter if we’re “over it.” Our enemy, Covid, is endlessly crafty, energetic, and vicious. I know. I recently spent 16 days in the hospital and nine days in a rehabilitation facility after contracting the virus. I was fully vaccinated and boosted, and it nearly broke me. As in all battles, it’s ourselves that matter even more than our opponents: our vanities, our fears, our prejudices, our malice. If we can manage ourselves, we will vanquish the enemy. George Will, the conservative columnist, wondered if our country, as constituted now, could win the Second World War. I wonder, too. It isn’t only the reluctance to sacrifice for the common good; it’s the refusal to believe the credible. Millions indulge themselves with fantastic speculation backed by no evidence and sometimes no logic and reject that which comes with freight-loads of scientific proof or that which they witnessed—re January 6th—with their own eyes. That refusal to acknowledge basic reality breaks down community, too. We can’t even get to the point of disagreeing. A sub-group of Americans in the ’40s, die-hard America-Firsters, pushed the theory that FDR had been behind the attack on Pearl Harbor. But they were called nuts by the huge majority. Now there is no “nut” theory that doesn’t get a hearing and eventually, it seems, a substantial following. Our parents and grandparents may have grumbled, but they collectively pulled themselves together: gathered scrap, rationed, and sent their sons to fight. They accepted hard truths, facts they didn’t like. They knew the news wasn’t always going to be good and didn’t reach for a scapegoat to blame. Well, not usually at least. And when the dreaded telegraph arrived, they grieved but knew their sacrifice went beyond themselves—went out to the country they loved. They got some comfort from knowing that. Though death is always solitary, the country they sacrificed for came back to them in a collective embrace. We love the same country. And if we truly love that country, it will love us. Can we do less than our previous generations? Can we even imagine loving our fellow Americans? As I mentioned in a recent post, I am not a cook. I do not have the patience or the desire to devote a significant part of each day to preparing food. If it comes in a box or a can with a “Healthy Choice” label on it, it’s good enough for me. I’ll steam some vegetables and cut up some fruit and be good to go. My mother was a good cook, a trained home economist, who I now believe had about as much interest in cooking as I do. She prepared meals out of obligation. Somehow I never even gave in to the guilt. My sister is a superb cook, particularly of ethnic foods. She bakes her own bread and makes her own pasta. My maternal grandmother was a regionally renown cook. I did not inherit any of those genes. At this time of year, many of you are dusting off family recipes and preparing those traditional dishes that make the holidays special. Good for you. I’m cloistered comfortably in my home accepting Christmas goodies from kind-hearted neighbors. It works beautifully. I have no problem being their charity case. But I’ve been paying attention to what my family and friends are preparing for the holiday. Let’s start right here at my house. Many of you know that my husband, Rick, is a master bourbon ball maker. He revels in crafting visually perfect bourbon balls from a pleasing blend of butter, sugar, chocolate, and a wide variety of bourbons. (He’ll trade you a box of confections for an unusual bourbon, if you’re curious about how it will hold up against the other competing flavors.) I had never known Rick to spend any time in the kitchen until after his mother died in 2012. She had been the family purveyor of traditional Kentucky bourbon balls, and they needed to make an appearance at family gatherings. So Rick started working with her recipe, recalling the time he had served as her hands in the kitchen while she gave him instructions when she wasn’t well enough to do the physical labor herself. This year, it seems, Rick has spent ten to twelve hours a day in the kitchen for weeks on end making his mother’s bourbon balls. People all across central Kentucky are happier because of it. I have written about my dear friend Philip who passed away in May. His sister Joan recently shared a story of Philip trying valiantly to reproduce his mum’s traditional Irish mincemeat pies after her death in 2018. Joan described his first attempt as “pretty awful,” but said he was improving. As youngsters, they had failed to relay to their brother Brendan that the pies were deliciously sweet, so he wouldn’t eat them for years, leaving more for Philip and Joan. Brendan didn’t learn what he had been missing until he was in his 20s. This year Joan is baking her mother’s Christmas cookies. She plans to pick up the mincemeat pies next year—in memory of both Philip and their mum. My friend Kristi, who lives in Minnesota, couldn’t believe that I had never heard of potato sausage. That is her family’s Christmas tradition, along with oyster soup. As a child, neither looked appealing to her. She got a hot dog instead. As an adult, she has decided there is nothing better than a spicy potato sausage with a little ketchup. She will serve it for her holiday meal. Kristi’s grandfather made potato sausage at the meat market he owned in Maiden Rock, Wisc. Her grandmother later worked at the Red Owl grocery in Red Wing, Minn. Today, Koplin's Village Market in Red Wing still uses her grandfather’s recipe to make their potato sausage. It’s a family Christmas tradition that has been extended to many in the Red Wing community. Jacalyn Carfagno, a longtime Lexington Herald-Leader writer and editor, recently wrote about learning to make biscotti from her dad after he retired and “returned to the Italian-American foods that had nourished him as a child.” Carfagno has continued the tradition of holiday biscotti baking every year since. In her article, she describes her vigilant pursuit of new biscotti recipes to add to her regular rotation of hazelnut, chocolate, pistachio, and fig/walnut. And she references a common factor in holiday food preparation: “Like many holiday traditions, the way I make them is highly ritualized.” These rituals bring us comfort. They connect us to family and friends who can no longer gather with us around the table. They tie us to each other and cement the bonds that make family—however you define it—special. And they present the rest of us some pretty darn good eating. Whatever your family food traditions, whether you’re cooking or not, here’s wishing you a a warm and memorable and delectable holiday. Cathy Eads, of Atlanta, surveys Georgia’s political landscape. If you would like to submit a post to Clearing the Fog, please contact us here. Once again, it appears the state of Georgia will be the center of the political campaigning universe in the United States during 2022. With David Perdue’s entry into the gubernatorial race, the plot thickens. Months ago, when Herschel Walker announced his candidacy as a Republican opponent to Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock, I started writing a post entitled “Run, Herschel, Run (right back to Texas).” Now his campaign is just one ingredient in the Georgia political stew. I still think it’s unethical for Herschel Walker to “move back” to Georgia two weeks before filing as a candidate to represent the people in a state he left in 2011. Walker also has a history of mental illness and alleged domestic violence. But this is politics, folks. Laws and ethics don’t seem to influence (or apply to) the behavior of many political figures. While some of us may believe it’s unethical, under the Constitution it is perfectly legal for him to run. Of course, University of Georgia football is a religion all its own, so Walker is like a god to many Dawgs fans. Plus, he may get the endorsement of 45, which will garner him much favor with the far-right crowd. The former president could be a significant problem for Brian Kemp in his campaign for re-election as Governor. If you recall, Kemp refused to help “find votes” to reverse Biden’s win in the Georgia presidential election. Now David Perdue presents a challenge as well. Democrats are quietly celebrating the entry of Perdue, as his candidacy will likely force a Republican run-off election. That makes three Republican gubernatorial candidates, including Big Lie supporter Vernon Jones. I’m sure there are bookies taking bets on who 45 will back: Perdue or Jones? What might he say or do to retaliate against Kemp’s disloyal behavior? Stay tuned for what is bound to be the worst kind of reality TV. Just a few years ago, the idea that Georgia would elect two Democratic U.S. Senators, and that we were a swing state that could win Democratic control of the Senate, would have been laughable. In many Georgia communities, the Democratic party did not field candidates in local and state legislative races for roughly 20 years. I have no doubt that voter registration and GOTV efforts for 2022 will be extraordinary. Stacey Abrams, her supporters, and the Fair Fight* organization excel at both. I believe electing Stacey Abrams Governor of Georgia will bring joy, hope, and continued motivation to Democrats, most African Americans, and many women. It will also represent a monumental achievement in a deep south state steeped in racism since colonial times. Sixteen miles east of Atlanta lies Stone Mountain Park, where the largest bas-relief artwork in the world—featuring three Confederate leaders—was completed in 1972. The 90-foot-tall engraving looms over the patrons of the public park from the façade of Stone Mountain. A portion of funds for the Confederate memorial project came from the federal government’s 1925 issuance of fifty-cent commemorative coins featuring two Confederate generals. (Yes, that’s right. The federal government issued coins to commemorate traitors, and to help fund a monument to them.) The Ku Klux Klan held a revival during a 1915 cross burning atop Stone Mountain. According to an article by Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Joshua Sharpe, the most recent KKK permit request to burn a cross atop Stone Mountain was in August 2017, the same month as the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. That permit was denied. In 2022, Georgians can elect Stacey Abrams as Governor and choose Renitta Shannon as Lieutenant Governor. Electing two African American women to top leadership in a state with such a sordid history around race and white supremacy will be a colossal achievement. In addition, we can select Georgia State House member, and daughter of Vietnamese refugees, Bee Nguyen as our next Secretary of State. And we can also choose gay State House member Matthew Wilson as our next Insurance Commissioner. I look forward to the day when electing someone of a particular gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation doesn’t signify a great advancement in our society. Until then, I’ll mark these candidacies and their political wins as monuments—monuments that signify progress for the entire human race. *Fair Fight works to register voters and protect voting rights across the United States. To learn more or get involved, visit https://fairfight.com/
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