Wednesday

Good morning,

Quote of the day:

“The silence was absolute...alI I heard was the voice of the mountain...it was like hearing the voice of God.”

Gerald Tompkins when speaking of reaching the peak of Mount Everest.

Down in the area of Gulf Shores, Alabama there was a murder trial under way. The prosecution had charged ex-county commissioner Shephen Nodine with the murder of his mistress 45 year old Angel Downs. Angel’s corpse was found in the driveway of her Gulf Shores condo with one bullet hole in her head. Her pistol was found nearby with no one’s fingerprints on the weapon but hers. About 6 years before Angel and Stephen met at the infamous Flora-Bama Lounge. Let me tell y’all, I have been all over the world and Angel was in the top five best looking women I have ever seen in person top to bottom, she had everything. Angel and Stephen would come over to Pensacola Beach on occasion and party. They would stop in my favorite watering hole from time to time. Conversations stopped when she walked in the door. Their relationship was a rocky one however. They squabbled frequently. Regardless of that Stephen spent many a night in her condo in spite of he being married and having a passel of kids. At one time he was considered a rising star in Alabama politics, not anymore. Angel had said more than once that she wished Stephen would divorce his wife and marry her so they could spend the rest of their days together but she eventually realized it was not going to happen. She broke up with Stephen and dated at least two other men. Just before she was found dead, Stephen had stormed into the Flora-Bama screaming “Where is the whore!” This blow up was witnessed by at least 100 people. Angel was not there but was found dead a little while later. What really got Stephen’s goat was a few nights before he walked in on Angel in bed with another man. The man was a friend that had known Angel for 30 years and she had asked him to stay with her that night because her front door lock was broken and she was afraid. That is what the man testified to. He said that Nodine walked into the bedroom unannounced and threw a garage door opener at her and left in a huff. The prosecution is claiming that Stephen killed Angel in a jealous rage. Stephen’s defense is that Angel committed suicide because her income had been cut in half in the last few years because of the economy and she could not pay her bills. On occasion Stephen would bring his older sons over and they would sleepover in Angel’s house. The impression I got is that Stephen was a man of power in that area of the country and was not used to not getting his way and being rejected. In any event his political career is over and if he is convicted of killing that beautiful creature, I will lift a toast to every day he spends in the joint...or the day that pesky needle finds it mark.

There has been quite a bit of activity down in the South Carolina “low country”. That is the area of South Carolina that is roughly between I-95 and the coast and between the Georgia and the North Carolina borders. Down near the Ashepoo convenience store there was an apparent gang fight between two cars and eight men. People in both cars opened fire on each other. Witnesses said it sounded like a young war and the cops were called. The cops stopped one of the cars on the way out from the site and the other very near the site. Seven people were arrested. Many years ago I used to hunt deer with bow and arrow in the area of “Ashepoo Plantation” which is very near this site. There is nothing there, y'all...except live oaks, Spanish moss, alligators, water moccasins, rattlesnakes and yes...a lot of deer. Times have apparently changed.

Then down near Beaufort there was a shooting outside the “Nighthawks” motorcycle clubhouse with one person suffering a non life-threatening gunshot wound. The cops said that they interviewed everyone there and nobody saw or heard anything. So what do y'all expect?

Thursday morning Larry Cooper was released on bail up in Charlotte for breaking into a church. Larry was required to wear a locator anklet until his trial. Three hours later the police detected that Larry’s anklet had been cut and about the same time a custodian walked into his church and saw a burglar who escaped by breaking out one of the rear windows. The cops and a dog were there in short order and the dog tracked the burglar down. It was none other than good old Larry Cooper. His is back in the joint under two charges, destroying an electronic device and breaking and entering a house of worship, second offense. I nominate Larry to be a candidate for the AGCUS award.

This Date in History December 17

1777 Earlier in October British General John Burgoyne had his ass handed to him by Patriot General Horatio Gates and the Continental army at the Battle of Saratoga, New York. The news of that ass-kicking reached France and our minister to France, Benjamin Franklin, on December 24. Franklin had been leaning on France to recognize the United Sates as an independent nation. The king of France, Louis XVI had been reluctant to openly recognize the United States until they had proven they were capable of holding their own against the mightiest army in the world, that being the British army and the victory at Saratoga demonstrated that. France had secretly been sending supplies to the United States for years. But on this date, Ben Franklin prevailed and France officially recognized the United States as a free and independent nation. This, of course meant war with England. France had been smarting about the loss of the North American continent to the British during the Seven Years War and the French and Indian War and they saw this as a way of sticking it to the British in revenge. Even though there was five more years of bloody conflict in our future, there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

1862 US General Ulysses Grant in a fit of anger issued an order that bans all Jews from his “department” and that being the states of Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi. The reason was this. As a result of Grant’s military successes, thousands of slaves escaped which proved to be one hell of a logistics problem. One of the solutions was to have the slaves pick the cotton in abandoned fields and share in the profit once the Federal government sold off the cotton bales. The problem was that the cotton traders, mostly Jews, tried to divert the sale of the cotton from the government to the free market and to themselves. They could make an enormous profit in this process. The final straw came when Grant’s father came to visit and he was accompanied by two men that had befriended Grant’s father on the train. It turned out that the two men were Jewish cotton traders that had befriended Grant’s father in the hopes of using Grant’s father as an avenue for them to get their hands of some of that cotton. Needless to say that Grant hit the damned roof when he found out the true reason the Jews had befriended his father. I would have been pretty upset myself. It took the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln to order Grant to rescind the order. Grant did indeed rescind the order but his dislike of the Jews prevailed throughout the rest of his life.

1905 On this momentous day two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio name Wilbur and Orville Wright got a contraption that they had created to fly on under its own power for the first time in the history of the world on the dunes of Kitty Hawk, NC. This airplane flew for 12 seconds for a distance of 120 feet which is a little short of the wingspan of a Boeing 747. Just think on it folks, just 11 years later World War I fighter planes were flying 100 miles an hour for over an hour. There is no need for me to go into how far we have come in the aviation field since then. In the span of 100 years we have seen men on the moon and have erected a manned space station. It boggles mind.

1996 “Operation Iceman” comes to an end with the arrest of Richard Kuklinski in a truck stop on the New Jersey turnpike. A multiple killer, Kuklinski was brought down by an undercover agent named Dominick Pulitrone. It was believed that Kuklinski killed his business partner in 1980 with a shot to the head and stuffed him into a 55 gallon barrel and then froze it. He disposed of the body in 1983. He formed another partnership with two other men named George Mallibrand and Louis Matheny. They were in an illegal business and Kuklinski got nervous and decide to kill them both. He shot Matheny and poisoned Mallibrand with cyanide. The undercover agent had made friends with Kuklinski and asked Kuklinski the best way to kill someone and Kuklinski answered with cyanide. He is right. The physical evidence disappears almost immediately. It can kill with ingestion and even a spray in the face. From this the ATF was able to amass enough evidence to put Kuklinski away for life without parole.

1941 Here it is only 10 days after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and the hunt is complete for a scapegoat, they found one in the Commander of the Pacific Fleet, Rear Admiral Husband Kimmel. On this date he was relieved of command. Previously, Kimmel had been a favorite of President Roosevelt and have served admirable as various battleship commanders. His damning fault was that he did not put enough credence in his intelligence sources. There were plenty of clues that an attack was imminent but chose to believe that attack was going to happen somewhere else other than Hawaii. His US army counterpart, General Walter Short was also relieved of command at the same time, they were both acknowledged scapegoats and during their court martial they were not even allowed to testify in their own behalf nor call witnesses. The court martial accused and convicted them of dereliction of duty. In February of 1941, Rear Admiral Kimmel had received a temporary rank of Admiral while overseeing a training exercise of the Pacific Fleet but he reverted back to his original rank of Rear Admiral after war had been declared on December 8. Both commanders were not given the military intelligence available to those in Washington. If they had; perhaps things would nave been different. They are those that believe US President Roosevelt allowed that attack to take place to get the Unites States people on a wartime footing. Roosevelt had stated on more than one occasion that “Unless attacked, the United States would not fight wars on foreign soil.” Well, here was an attack and sure enough, the United States did indeed fight wars on foreign soils.

Birth and deaths:

1796 Canadian writer Thomas Halliburton is born, he said “Nicknames stick to people, the more ridiculous, the more adhesive.” I have a friend and mentor nicknamed “Pathwalker” or “PW”. He got that name because he was in a local tavern near his house and when he decided to leave he thought it would be best to walk home because he did not want a DUI. He was walking toward his house through a park with defined paths when he was stopped by the cops. They locked him up for public drunkenness...thus “Pathwalker”.

1957 English writer Dorothy Sayers dies. She said “As I grow older and totter toward the tomb, I find I care less and less who goes to bed with whom."

Quotable quotes:

“Never raise your hands to your kids; it leaves your groin unprotected.”

                                                Red Buttons

         Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow