Friday

                       Musing and History

Quote of the day:

“Stress is nothing more than a sociably acceptable definition of mental illness.”

                                            Richard Carlson

I just read where the South Carolina violent crimes are reduced by several percentage points over this time in 2009. Then in the next column I read where South Carolina has taken over third place in the FBI “states with the most violent crimes per capita.” As most of you can guess, it all depends who is giving out the facts as to who is the most accurate. I would not doubt the FBI rating. Almost every day I make a comparison with the violent crimes in the Greenville/Spartanburg/Charlotte arena as compared with crimes in the Austin, Texas area. I chose Austin because it is a close approximation to the Greenville/Spartanburg area in population. There is no comparison. There are three times the violent crimes up here in the piney woods of northwestern South and North Carolina than in the Austin area. I do not know what the reasoning is. Unfortunately, perhaps we rednecks here in the western Carolinas have less respect for the law than those cowboys around Austin.

Back in May a 19 year old Clemson coed was picking some things up from a storage facility she had rented. Suddenly she was attacked and thrown into an adjacent cubicle by a drifter that had rented the storage cubicle and was living there. He tied her up and raped her but he did not frisk her. After the drifter left the coed was able to free herself and called 911 on her undetected cell phone and was rescued by sheriff’s deputies. The deputies found out that a 37 year old man named Dennis Temple had rented the cubicle. Dennis was arrested that night and was taken to the Oconee County joint. He was charged with kidnapping, criminal sexual conduct and larceny. If he is convicted and does not get the death penalty (which is likely) he will be an old man when he sees the light of day again and rightfully so. Like I say, no respect for the law…or anything else.

       This Date in History September 16

1908 A great visionary William C. Durant founded General Motors with the consolidation of Buick, Oldsmobile and Cadillac along with Chevrolet, Delco, Fisher Body and Frigidaire. The first electric starter came on a 1912 Cadillac; the starter was invented by Charles Kettering. Pontiac came later on and with this consolidation General Motors surpassed Ford in gross sales. But in the early 60’s with the avalanche of better quality import cars, GM had to cut back, close some of their plants and re-think their product quality.

1924 Betty Joan Perske is born in Brooklyn. Betty was a born performer and showed it at an early age by working as a song and dance girl in the local community. Her Mother and Father were divorced and Betty changer her name back to her Mother’s maiden name Bacal, a Romanian name. Later she refined her name to Lauren Bacall. At the age of 18 she landed a role in the movie To Have or Have Not with Humphrey Bogart. She and Bogie hit it off greatly and they were married until Bogie died of lung cancer in 1953. Later on she married Jason Robards but they were divorced soon afterward. She continued in show biz winning a Tony for her role in the Broadway play Applause. She won an Oscar nomination for her movie role as Barbra Streisand’s mother in The Mirror Has two Faces. A very talented lady and I remember the most in The Shootist with John Wayne.

1832 George Washington Custis Lee is born to Robert E. and Mary Custis Lee in Fort Monroe, Virginia. Custis followed his father to West Point and as his father did graduated first in his class in 1854. During his last two years at West Point his father was superintendent. At the outset of the War Between the States, CSA President Jefferson Davis requested Custis Lee as his Aide-de-Camp and was given the task of reinforcing the defenses around Richmond even though Custis was verbal in his request for a field command. After his father died in 1870 as President of Washington (Soon to be known as Washington and Lee) College, Custis became president until he retired in 1897. Custis died in Fairfax, Va. in 1913. Thus ended the lineage of great American leaders going back to “Light Horse Harry” Lee of the American Revolution.

1620 English ship Mayflower left Plymouth harbor bound for the new world, Jamestown, Virginia in particular. After a stormy 66 day passage and being blown off course by 500 miles they end up at the tip of Cape Cod and dropped anchor in Providencetown harbor. While enroute the passengers got together and made up a document known as the Mayflower Compact. This document was the earliest basis for what is now our present democracy. A few armed men under the leadership of Myles Standish depart the ship and begin a hunt for a suitable site to begin a settlement. They find and open field with plenty of running water and named it Plymouth. An interesting fact about Standish was that he was so short that he had to cut 6 inches off his sword and scabbard to keep them from dragging the ground, that would make him no taller than 5’-3” and probably shorter. But he was a fiery and capable military commander, we are lucky he was aboard. The Mayflower is sailed around to Plymouth harbor and thus began preparations for the tough upcoming winter. The majority of those aboard were religious dissidents against the Church of England the rest were opportunist and entrepreneurs. While anchored in Plymouth harbor one Susanna White delivered a son name Peregrine he being the first child born in this new settlement. In my opinion, this expedition along with the founding of Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, ranks up there with the Lewis and Clark expedition as being the greatest adventure of all time. I would have loved to be on either one.

1943 James Alan McPherson is born in Savannah, Georgia. James is a very smart man and a gifted writer and attended Harvard Law School. James won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1977 for his novel Elbow Room being the first and only black man to do so. He also won $196,000 award from the Guggenheim “Genius” foundation. After this his life began to unravel. His interracial marriage failed resulting in a bitter custody fight and his favorite student committed suicide. McPherson wrote but little after that and waited 20 years before writing the novel Crabcakes which was about his trip to Japan to escape the burden of racism. (His words).

Born today:

1919 US psychologist Dr Lawrence Peter. He said “Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lens, is in the eye of the beholder.” To me competence is directly tied to the complexity of the issue and the mental capabilities of the solver. There are those that are assigned issues too complex for the solvers abilities, that ain’t incompetence of the solver that is the incompetence of the assigner. In my humble opinion, at least half of a manager’s responsibilities are to assign duties that make the solver stretch his imagination but not so far out of reach of their capabilities that they become discouraged.

Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow