Little Hannah, The Accidental Juror, and Little Round Top

I’ve not posted in almost five months, which must mean my life is in one of those periods of routine events taking over. Not blog-worthy. In my world since the end of May, it’s been a hotter-than-hell summer in Texas, with week after week temperatures over 100°.  Even more importantly to Nita and me, our sixth grandchild, Hannah Mae McBride, was born on August 22.  She’s a doll, isn’t she? 

 

And, the sweet girl's birth interrupted the final wrap-up of my new novel, The Accidental Juror.

TAJ is my tenth novel, each having sprung from a yearlong gestation and a final grateful birthing. TAJ took me into new ground as ‘modern’ historical fiction. It’s a fictitious story of a young woman who is the first woman in her county to be summoned for jury service. Historically, women in Texas were not allowed on juries until an amendment to the state constitution passed in November of 1954, so the first women to sit in jury boxes did so in 1955. This was 35 years after the women’s suffrage movement won women the right to vote in 1920. 

My tale is about Lynn Edwards, a 28-year-old-mother who ‘accidentally’ receives a postcard in the mail calling her to jury duty. I won’t be a spoiler, but Lynn encounters resistance and support from unexpected places. Writing about 1955, when I was six, was great fun and little touchy. The fun part was including houses with no air-conditioning but with attic fans, big black corded telephones, the early days of black-and-white television, big flashy cars with big fins, and young men with ‘Elvis’ hair. The touchy part was addressing our segregated society in a way that was realistic. Deciding on an appropriate crime for the trial was important, and I think, but I’m still not really sure, I came up with one that is serious enough and interesting enough to make a good courtroom story.  All to say, please take a look at The Accidental Juror on Amazon. You can read the first chapter by clicking ‘Look Inside.’ Then you can make me happy by buying a Kindle or a paperback version.

Here's the link to the Amazon page:     https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BF2ZRXP4

You may be one of my friends whose connection is through Civil War reenacting, which I’ve regretfully aged out of, helped along by the years of COVID cancellations of events. While I’m not reenacting any longer, I’m still a Civil War nut, having returned to tabletop wargaming with miniature soldiers. Here’s a pic of my brother and me this summer refighting Hood’s assault of Little Round Top at Gettysburg.

Otherwise, it’s the season of the Longhorns and Cowboys, both of which may have long seasons.

Teaching Kids About an Ugly Past

Yesterday I stepped off an airplane that flew directly from Frankfurt, Germany to Austin, Texas. The plane was packed with both Americans and Germans—two nationalities that share the difficult challenge of how to teach our children about the sins of their grandfathers.

My aim today is not to address how we teach our own children about our national sin of three hundred years of legal American slavery. Suffice to say that those of us, like me, whose ancestors owned slaves most likely have some conflicting emotions buried inside. And I suspect those of us whose ancestors fought in the Confederate army simply to defend their homeland from invaders also sometimes question the roots of the ‘lost cause,' in honor of which so many statues were erected on southern courthouse lawns.

But today is about Germany and World War II.

In Nuremberg, Germany, on the last day of our trip, we visited sites where huge Nazi rallies were held, outdoor venues of immense concrete edifices and vast open space for up to half a million people to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, chanting, singing, experiencing the emotional high of a shared devotion to an inspirational leader, as they became part of a highly-efficient propaganda machine. As a side note, we learned the citizens who attended these enormous rallies had to buy tickets to the events.

The same day, we ended our tour of WWII Nuremberg by sitting in the courtroom where in 1945, just months after the war ended, 21 Nazi leaders were tried for crimes against humanity in an international court with judges from France, England, the United States, and Russia.

As I stared at the box where the defendants had sat during the long trial, I couldn’t help but think that the trial had offered the German people a free-pass to dump their collective guilt onto those 21 men. To those bakers and housewives whose cities had been bombed to rubble, whose sons had died by the hundreds of thousands for the Nazi cause, the 21 men on trial could conveniently assume the burden of Germany’s national sin of the genocide of millions in the gas chambers and the slave labor of millions more. No doubt such scapegoats were welcomed by the ‘uninvolved’ men and women who no longer needed to rationalize, to look the other way, while mass executions surrounded them during the Nazi years.

One of our German tour guides spoke to the challenge of how in 2022 to teach the children of Germany about WWII. Like here in the USA,  public education is a state-level function, rather than a national one, and we were told there are 16 varying approaches to teaching about WWII and the Nazi regime.

She said until the 1970’s, usually the decade from 1935 to 1945 was generally ignored by teachers who were unwilling and unsure how to teach the years of Hitler’s horrific regime. Schools simply left it to parents and grandparents to let their children know or not know the evil realities behind their devastated country.

From the 1980’s until now, she said there was more coverage of the war and Hitler, but not much about the genocide. An aside: Who knows what was taught to East German children under the Soviet era until the Soviet collapse in 1989?

These days, our guide said there is a growing effort to shift the lens away from textbook photos of the Nazis’ mass rallies and giant swastikas, to stories of everyday citizens who simply endured the era. They are trying to take the memorable Nazi ‘optics’ out of the spotlight. Stop letting the ghosts of the Nazi past define the teaching of the Nazi era to the children of today. Quit showing the propaganda photos the Nazi’s themselves created of their lockstep rallies, the mass ‘Seig Heil’ straight-arm salutes, the adoration of a madman. Replace those visuals with other optics—of what exactly, I don’t know.

As a side note, I personally doubt if the shift to sidestep the terrible Nazi scheme to ‘purify’ Europe by murdering millions of civilians will ever include the chilling photos taken by Americans who first came upon the extermination camps, photos and films which were shown in the Nuremberg trial.

What  was hammered home to me in Nuremberg is that we walk a slippery slope when teaching kids about an ugly past. It's hard, damned hard, to be critical of our grandparents. Yet, sometimes the hard truths need to be dredged up if we expect our grandchildren not to go down the same terrible road that our grandparents did. 

 

 

 

Tunnel Hill and Sixty Years

 

What people like doesn’t change all that much. At least for me. I still love the same woman after fifty-two years. I still wear button-down shirts. And I’ve had the same hobby for sixty years—collecting, painting, and playing tabletop wargames with lead soldiers. Here are two photos of me at the wargame boards in my house, the first one in 1962, the second one in 2022.

The military miniatures haven’t really been cast of lead for a long time now, all the makers having switched to pewter. Our tabletop terrain has vastly improved from chalk-drawn forests on bare plywood, but back then we spent every spare dime on soldiers, not model railroad terrain. My brother and I were poor young teenagers, after all.

Back in the ‘60’s I didn’t care about the history the toy soldiers represented, I just liked to buy them, paint them, and play tabletop games with simple home-grown rules. There was one guy in California named Jack Scruby who sculpted and produced military miniatures for tabletop wargaming. He advertised his catalog in Boys Life magazine, where we discovered him. Now, there are endless choices of companies sculpting and producing highly detailed miniatures of every imaginable historical army from the ancient Egyptians to modern armies, and fantasy figures from Tolkien’s elves and dwarves to post-apocalyptic mutants.

Of late, I’ve taken to playing solo games of specific Civil War battles, with lots of attention paid to replicating the historical terrain and regiments which fought, right down to the correct flags they carried. These photos are of my tabletop today, in the midst of the battle of Tunnel Hill at Chattanooga, Tennessee in November 1863. The tunnel entrance is still there, looking like it did in 1863. It was the challenge to use a paper template of the rock face of the entrance (downloaded from the website of the Fire & Fury game company). Drawing on the methods used in my junior high science fair days, I cut up a cardboard shoebox and shaped the humped tunnel you see in the photo.  

Here's the bigger picture of the game: 

I am perhaps drawn to this particular Civil War battle because I’ve walked the ground a couple of times—it’s now an urban, and neglected, National Park site. And Tunnel Hill is one of the key battles in my first Civil War novel, Whittled Away; And one of the Confederate regiments in the thick of the fighting was the 6^th Texas Infantry, which is the historical regiment chosen by our reenacting club for our name, the ‘Alamo Rifles’ since the men who formed one company of the 6^th Texas came from San Antonio. The photo is us in a sham battle in Tennessee, not Tunnel Hill, though. But our flag in the photo is the same one they carried at the battle of Tunnel Hill.

To close, here is a meme off the ‘net that reminds me of the heroic defense ongoing in Ukraine this week.
Bless those patriots. May God give them the strength to persevere and stay the course.

50 Years of Being 'Phil & Nita'

I am 72. Nita is 73. We have not (yet) lived particularly long lives. Looking ahead, we may or may not experience the luxury living through our eighty’s, into our ninety’s. We don’t know if either of us will face the challenge of living with grace and dignity as our abilities to keep doing what we’ve always done, fall away, one at a time. That’s the unknown future.

The wonderful known thing of now, is that today is our 50^th wedding anniversary. For more than 2/3 of our lives, Nita and I have been ‘us.’  I’ve said more than a few times that she and I aren’t just married, we’re joined at the hip.

It’s common to hear couples joke about staying married a long time. They mention making it through the ‘rough patches.’  Maybe I’m wearing blinders, or am already senile, but I honestly don’t remember any particularly rough patches in our five decades of marriage. I think that means that if God sometimes shoves two young people at each other, His hands were on our backs in the days when we were barely adults.

Fifty years of marriage has never been a special goal of ours. Neither of our own parent couples reached a golden anniversary, due to the mid-life divorce of my parents and the sudden death of Nita’s father just a few weeks after our wedding. We all know that lives end unexpectedly, and paths chosen early in life, change. We understand that both luck and God’s grace have helped our marriage. We are proud of reaching fifty years together, and rather than having attained a goal, we’re viewing today as a mile marker, a noteworthy stake alongside the road with a gravel pull-out for a little celebration before moving further on down the highway.

Regretfully, the first week of 2022 has already unveiled itself as another frustrating year of on-again-off-gain gatherings. Plans for our golden anniversary reception later today have moved from maskless to masked, from indoors to outdoors. and may wind up as only an intimate family gathering. Our little town is not in a protective bubble. Nearly one in three people in our county are testing positive for the new Covid, and not surprisingly, our circle of friends includes a lot of seniors like us who are shy about exposing themselves to infection. Nonetheless, we’ll toast ourselves with whoever shows up.

And yesterday, bless them both, our two sons each put surprise gifts in front of us. Son Ben carried in a small table he built, the top of which is an old stained-glass window that was salvaged from the demolition of the church where we were hitched. Now that’s a meaningful momento.

After we previewed the Power Point slide show of highlights of our fifty-year marriage that I pulled together for today’s reception, son Todd said, “We’re not done yet. Stay seated.”

He then popped up on the big TV screen an anniversary congratulations speech to us from actor Sean Aston.  Sean, otherwise known as Samwise Gamgee, J.R.R. Tolkien’s character who was the relucant compass who kept Frodo on the hard but truth path.  I first read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy in 1967, and in 2014 I almost missed the tour bus just so I could drink a pint in the tavern in Oxford, England where Tolkien and C.S. Lewis hung out. The short congratulatory speech to us from the guy who played Sam was touching and cool, and for the second time in the day before our anniversary, I wiped away tears. It struck me for not the first time that Nita’s and my best work lay in our two sons.

So, later today we will celebrate with whoever shows up, and the day after we will begin our second half-century together. Stay tuned.