Ken’s father was also named Kenneth Gibson, and this had been a source of confusion for me and others, going all the way back to high school when I had to remember to ask for “John” when calling his house, because his mother thought of “Ken” as her husband, and they used Ken’s middle name “John” around the house.

I remember Ken Sr. a bit from back then. He was a nice guy, and pretty smart too. He worked at Zenith as a mechanical engineer, and he was probably responsible for making mechanical engineering seem interesting enough to spur Ken to attempt an ME degree, before eventually deciding he liked business classes better.

It was around this time that Ken’s father had open-heart surgery. This was back in the early days of coronary artery bypass grafting, before modern minimally invasive techniques were available, and it was a big deal. The surgeon was flown into town, presumably so local surgeons could learn the technique. His son would have the modern version of this surgery a few decades later.

In later years, I didn’t see Ken Sr. much, but Ken would tell me stories about what they were up to. They always had some do-it-yourself project going on at the house, and they took a lot of trips. They were both Civil War buffs, and they took several trips to visit the battlefield at Gettysburg. I also remember an epic trip to Alaska. Ken adored his father, and devoted years of his life to care for him.

In June of 2017, Ken had a stroke, and his father ended up living with my wife and I for a few months while Ken recovered and then had heart surgery himself. With both of them under our care for a while, things got confusing, because they both used the same doctor’s office and hospital, so every time I talked to a doctor or every time a therapist showed up, we always had to clarify which one of them we were talking about. This amused both of them.

We got to know Ken Sr pretty well that summer. He needed a walker, but he was able to get around the house pretty well, and although he sometimes forgot things, he was pretty sharp for his age. He could do his own blood tests and give his own insulin shots. He was also a charming and courteous guest. That actually made it a little hard to take care of him, because if we set up his bath incorrectly or fed him food he didn’t like, he wouldn’t tell us, no matter how much we asked. We’d only find out later when he told Ken.

In later years, Ken Sr.’s health declined, and he had to be hospitalized several times. Ken also told me that his father’s dementia was getting worse, to the point where he basically had no short term memory. This turned out to have a silver lining, because even though the hospital staff was obliged to inform him that his son had died, he forgot about it overnight. When asked about his son, he would say Ken was “doing OK.” Neither we nor the hospital staff saw any reason to correct him, and he spent the rest of his days unaware of the terrible news.

Around Christmas, Ken Sr. was discharged to a nursing home, which promptly returned him to the hospital because of severe pain and low blood pressure. Shortly before the end of the year, Ken’s doctors discovered that he had advanced liver cancer, which explained a lot of his symptoms. They informed us that because of his age and his other health problems it was effectively untreatable, and that he didn’t have long to live. At their recommendation, we approved him for hospice care.

Kenneth Lee Gibson passed away on Monday, January 3, 2022.

It turns out the confusion over father and son having the same name did not stop with their deaths. When we approved hospice care for Ken Sr., the hospital asked which funeral home to use, and we gave them the name of the place we were using for Ken Jr. So when Ken Sr. died, the hospital called the funeral home before we did, and they told the funeral home they could come pick up the body of Kenneth Gibson. This apparently freaked out the funeral director because he had just picked up the body of Kenneth Gibson from the coroner’s office. He had to have been wondering if he had somehow gotten the bodies confused.

It’s early yet, but as things stand, I might be getting involved in settling the Gibson estates, so I think they will be confusing me — and others — for sometime to come.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Ken Gibson, Rest In Peace (reprise)

My brother just died. He wasn’t really my brother — I never had any siblings — but he was the closest thing to a brother I’ve ever had.

I first met Kenneth John Gibson in the fall of 1978, at Luther North High School on the northwest side of Chicago. We had a bunch of classes in common and we teamed up in Unified Science class the first year. The class was a 70s-modern concept that allowed students to choose from an assortment of paths to earn their grade, and at some point Ken and I realized we could game the system by working through a huge stack of science-based crossword puzzles. We spent weeks doing nothing else and got good grades that quarter.

We were both big science geeks. We stuck together as science class partners for the next two years. Sometimes, where there was big space news — like the space shuttle — the teachers would let us explain it to the class because we paid a lot more attention to space news than they did. We both played around with the (primitive) computer we had access to, and in our senior year we volunteered as lab assistants,

After high school, we both ended up going to the Illinois Institute of Technology, where Ken took Mechanical Engineering like his father. He later switched his major to Business, and he went on to get an MBA from the Stuart School of Business at the downtown campus, where he also ended up working as their IT manager, taking care of the computer labs and the faculty personal computers. He also taught a few classes.

Ken and I settled into a pattern in our friendship. When I was dating the young lady who would become my wife, Ken and I didn’t see much of each other. Then after I got married, he and I and my wife got together every week or so to see a movie together. That pattern continued throughout our lives — we’d be thick as thieves for a year or so, and then we’d lose touch for a year or so. We wouldn’t talk for months, and they we’d play Borderlands online three or four times a week for months. I’ve heard from another of Ken’s friends who experienced a similar pattern.

Ken kept a lot of stuff to himself. He wasn’t exactly a secretive guy, but it somehow didn’t occur to him to voluntarily share things with his friends. I think he just didn’t realize other people might care. When his mother died — a wonderful woman whom I’d met many times — he didn’t mention it to me until six weeks later.

He dated a woman named Sandy and they moved in together for a few years before breaking up. That’s about all I know. He rarely talked about her with me. I only ever met Sandy a few times when she was visiting Ken at IIT. He never invited us over to their house, or brought her along when he joined my wife and I for a movie. Eventually, they broke up, but I don’t really know why. He didn’t want to talk about it, and I didn’t want to push him.

Ken went through a geocaching phase. He liked hunting for caches hidden by other players, and he hid a few caches of his own. Since he worked during the day, he did this at night. As you might imagine, this appeared suspicious enough to attract police attention, and more than once he found himself spread-eagle against a car, trying to explain geocaching to a hostile cop. It probably didn’t help that a few years earlier someone got pissed at something Ken did in traffic and falsely reported that Ken had pulled a gun. The case fell apart quickly, but I’ll bet that arrest came up every time a cop ran his driver’s license. (Naturally, Ken didn’t mention a word about any of these incidents until years after they happened.)

His appearance probably didn’t help. The photo above is more-or-less what Ken looked like for the last 20 years or so. We used to joke that he should be in the College Professor or Hobo quiz. (As I mentioned, he did teach college classes.) Those figures he’s holding are for a Flat Stanley project, where kids draw Stanley and mail him to people who pose with him in interesting places. Ken being Ken, he posed them in front of a famous Blues recording studio and the monument commemorating the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago.

One of the things I admired most about Ken was his basic kindness. Ken was always willing to help people. When he worked downtown, he didn’t just give money to the street people, he stopped to talk to them and got to know them. I remember him telling me about one guy he knew who later pulled up to him on the street to say hello. Ken was happy that the guy had pulled his life together well enough to afford a car.

When my mother died in 2009, I had to move in with my dad to take care of him. Ken helped me out several times, and he setup a computer for me so I could continue my consulting work while caring for my father.

A few years after starting this blog, I invited Ken to join me. He ended up writing over 50 posts.

At some point, Ken separated from Stuart School and moved out of Chicago to Antioch, Illinois, where he settled into semi-retirement taking care of his father. He liked that location because it was close enough to several hospitals for his dad, and it wasn’t too built-up.

Ken enjoyed the natural world. He replaced all the grass in his back yard with wild plants that were native to the Illinois prairie. It was insane to see. Some years the plants were over our heads.

Ken also loved watching the animals who lived in his area. He and his father were avid bird watchers, and he liked taking pictures. He also had cameras setup to record animal visitors at night. Check out his Flickr photostream and YouTube channel full of neighborhood critters.

One of our favorite activities together was driving around at night, listening to music, and just talking about whatever was on our minds — space, economics, computing, business, movies, books, and rather a lot of politics. We agreed about a lot of things, but Ken was more liberal and I was more libertarian, so we had our differences. There was a period a few years ago when he would sometimes get really worked up and start yelling at me. I didn’t call him on it, because I don’t think he quite meant it, but that was one of those periods when we drifted apart. When we picked up again later, he wasn’t angry any more.

Then one day in June of 2017, I got an unexpected call from Ken. The very first words out of his mouth were “I think I’ve just had a stroke and I need to go to the hospital.” Ken had suffered a stroke as a complication of congestive heart failure. A lot of stuff happened very quickly after that, and Ken and his father ended up living with us for a few months while Ken recovered. I wrote a bit more about that story in earlier blog posts: The day of the stroke, a few weeks later, and heart surgery. (To protect his privacy, I called him Leo in those posts and changed the name of the town he lived in, but those posts were about Ken and his dad.) Ever since, I’ve wondered if that angry period a few years earlier had been a symptom of a minor stroke.

After that, and for the next few years, Ken slowly recovered from his stroke. We drifted apart again during Covid, because neither of us wanted his father to catch it. I did help Ken get to and from the hospital a couple of times for heart care. Ken was able to drive, but hospital staff didn’t want him driving home after sedation. The last couple of times, he told me a neighbor was helping him.

Ken went to the hospital on Wednesday last week for an outpatient procedure, but there were complications, so they kept him overnight. I later found out that his neighbor, Joshua, went to check on Ken’s father that evening and found that he was in a lot of pain, so he called 911 and they took him to the same hospital Ken was at. The next morning, Ken was released and returned home. On Friday, Joshua went to check on Ken. He noticed Ken’s car was in the garage, but Ken wasn’t answering the door. Joshua called the police for a welfare check. When they entered the house, they found that Ken had died.

I spoke to Joshua on Saturday. It turns out he had been pretty good friends with Ken for about a year and a half. In typical Ken fashion, he hadn’t seen any reason to tell me anything more about Joshua than that he was “a neighbor,” not even his name. Joshua hadn’t heard much about me or my wife either. It was only by chance that we connected. I guess Ken probably didn’t think we’d be interested.

At this time, there are no plans for a funeral or memorial service since I don’t really know who his other friends are or how to get in touch with them. Also, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have wanted a full traditional funeral and burial. We never really talked about such things, but I suspect that anything less than the full Weekend at Bernie’s treatment would be a disappointment.

Ken would have laughed at that. I’m going to miss him so bad.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Ken Gibson, Rest In Peace

My grandfather was drafted out of the Hitler Youth into the Luftwaffe in ’43, when he was 16. In early ’45, he was assigned to man an AA gun, shooting at American planes. When the Americans crossed the Rhine in March and it was clear that the war was lost, he deserted along with a few of his high school classmates. They scrounged up a few supplies and split up, each man trying to reach his family. For my grandpa, that meant sneaking through the Ruhr pocket.

About a week later, he was caught by a lone GI. It was dusk, and my grandpa, who’d been sheltering in a ditch, was getting ready to move on under cover of night when the GI stepped out from behind a tree. Grandpa was armed, though he’d shed the uniform, and the soldier held him at gunpoint.

On his knees in a muddy ditch, an armed enemy combatant caught sneaking through occupied territory, he did the only thing he could think of. He said “please.” One word. In German. And after a long pause, the GI put up his gun, said “get up, boy,” and helped my grandpa out of what should have been his grave.

So thank you. From three generations now to another, far greater than any of ours. Not only did they risk their lives, give their lives, to put an end to the awful evil of Nazi Germany, but they showed us mercy, even when none needed to be shown.

To which Scott responds:

That was my father who let him go. Metaphorically.

On the other hand, metaphorically, my father shot him dead.

My dad had started fighting the war in Italy and later ended up in the forces following the D-Day invasion into France. My father was with some unit that was chasing the German occupiers out of some small town in France, and as they were moving down the street, he saw a bunch of people run out of a building up ahead.

One of the runners was wearing a German uniform, and as he had been doing for the past couple of years whenever he saw an enemy soldier, my father shot at him. The German went down. Dead.

Although my father had seen combat several times throughout the war, that was the only time, before or since, that he knew for sure he had killed someone.

Sixty years later, my dad told me that he still sometimes thinks about the man he killed, and he wonders if he could have done something different.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Memorial Day 2015

Over at the Chicago Sun-Times, Neil Steinberg has an obituary/eulogy for him. As with other great eulogies I’ve read, I finish it feeling like I’ve missed out on something good by never getting to know the subject personally.

Yet, in a way I can’t help feeling like I did know Roger Ebert personally. He’s been part of my life since I was a child, when I first started watching him and Gene Siskel on Sneak Previews on WTTW, our local PBS station, and I’ve been using his reviews to decide what movies to see ever since. My wife and I saw a lot of movies when we were dating and during our first decade of marriage — probably about 100 a year — and “What does Ebert say?” was almost always an important question.

Not that I agreed with him all that often. He would love movies I hated and hate movies I thought were lots of fun. The thing I noticed, however, was that regardless of how he felt about a movie, after reading his review I could usually make a pretty good guess about whether or not I would like it.

I think this is because Ebert was always honest in his reviews. His wasn’t afraid to show his biases, which meant that we could easily learn what they were and compensate for them. He was fascinated by realistic movies about addiction, for example, so I always knew to discount his reviews a bit when deciding whether to go see a movie that had addiction as a theme. And when he said the plot was confusing, that usually meant I would find it intriguing. By being himself in his writing, and being consistent about it, he conveyed a lot more information than if he had tried for some kind of journalistic neutrality.

(This is an attitude I have taken to heart. It’s something I try to do when I blog, and it’s one of the reasons I admire blogging as a journalistic form. The author’s biases are an important part of any written work, and the better we understand them, the better we understand the subject of the work.)

One of the things I found endearing about Ebert’s reviews is that he so clearly loved the movies. He always seemed genuinely happy for the filmmakers when he thought they did a great job. And even when he gave a movie a low rating, he would still spend some of his review discussing the parts of the movie that worked well. You could tell that he wanted movies to be better. Even in his infamous review of North, (“I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it.”) I got the feeling that he was not feeling snarky reviewer triumph, but rather that he was angry at having witnessed a filmmaking tragedy.

Ebert was an incredibly busy guy. In addition to writing reviews for the newspaper and talking about movies on his various television shows, he also wrote books about the movies and lectured about at the University of Chicago and hosted the Ebertfest film festival.  He was also online going way, way back. Before the internet, he was on AOL, and before that, he was on Prodigy and Compuserve. He also made his reviews available on the Cinemania movie encyclopedia software for PCs and Macs.

And like every other cutting-edge media figure, Roger Ebert had a blog. I’ll close with the first and last paragraphs of his last post, put up just before he went into the hospital for the last time. They serve as his  goodbye (although if you read the whole piece, you’ll see he had every intention of sticking around):

Thank you. Forty-six years ago on April 3, 1967, I became the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. Some of you have read my reviews and columns and even written to me since that time. Others were introduced to my film criticism through the television show, my books, the website, the film festival, or the Ebert Club and newsletter. However you came to know me, I’m glad you did and thank you for being the best readers any film critic could ask for.

…

So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.

Thank you, Roger, for forty-six years of terrific writing and wonderful movie reviews.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Going To The Movies Won’t Be The Same

Fortunately, the day doesn’t have a lot of personal significance for me. Other than veterans like my father who died of natural causes, all the soldiers I know are still alive and well. I don’t have any graves to decorate.

I’d very much like to keep it that way.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Decoration Day

Update: Oh, but there’s good news too. Kim Jong Il is also dead.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Damn

Ah, dammit:

Joel Rosenberg – husband, father, mensch

On Wednesday afternoon, June 1, 2011, Joel had a respiratory depression that caused a heart attack, anoxic brain damage and major organ failure. Despite the very best efforts of the paramedics and the team at Hennepin County Medical Center, Joel was pronounced brain dead at around 5:37pm Thursday June 2nd, In accordance with his wishes, he shared the gift of life through organ and tissue donation.

He is survived by his daughters, Judith Eleanor and Rachel Hannah, and his wife, Felicia Herman. Today, June 3rd would have been his 32nd wedding anniversary.

Felicia

Dammit. The internet just got a little less interesting.

Update: Got a little more time now…

I first ran into Joel in the comments at Scott Greenfield’s blog, where I was struck by the fact that even though he clearly had an emotional investment in the issues, he was willing to accept the possibility that he could be wrong, he was willing to consider alternative explanations, and he seemed to believe that, despite their errors, most of his opponents were acting with good intentions.

Another time, in his typically disarming style, Joel found a common link between gun owners and gay couples:

[Joel] suggests that after five years, mild-mannered Minnesotans have finally learned that a gun tucked into a waistband isn’t the sign of a blood-hungry nutcase.

“It’s like the gay couple that moves in down the block,” he says. “At first some people get upset, but after a while it’s just like, ‘Yeah, that’s just Joe and Todd.'”

Soon, he made an impression on me in another way when he cost me $99. Actually, if you read that post, Joel didn’t really cause the problem — MovableType just flaked on his avatar photo (above) for some reason — but he nevertheless apologized in the comments. That fits my impression of Joel: I’m pretty sure he knew I was kidding around, but he nevertheless responded by being courteous. Joel is quite capable of being a pain in the ass to people who’ve got it coming, but he’d hate to be a pain in the ass unintentionally.

A couple of months later, I invited Joel to be a co-blogger here. I did that based on the strength of his comments at other blogs. What I didn’t realize at the time is that Joel was an actual science fiction author. That’s right. I had asked a published author to come write for me for free. Joel, however, graciously accepted and went on to write 39 posts for me before moving on.

It’s going to be kind of quiet around here without him.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Joel Rosenberg R.I.P.

I have the good fortune of having lead a peaceful life. Other than my parents, no one really close to me has died. Perhaps if I’d experienced more tragedy, I’d understand people’s reactions better. What I’m saying is that I’m perfectly willing to admit that I just don’t get it. Still, there are things that just seem wrong.

I remember hearing many years ago that someone was proposing a memorial for the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, which is where he was assassinated by James Earl Ray in 1968. Part of the planned memorial was a laser beam, projected across the hotel grounds, that followed the path of the bullet that killed King.

To my way of thinking, this was completely the wrong way to honor Dr. King. The shooting at the Lorraine hotel had nothing to do with who King was and what he stood for. King did his great work in countless churches and gatherings, in marches and speeches and discussions with leaders all over the country. That’s what was important to Martin Luther King, and that’s what we should remember about him. That’s the part of his life we should honor.

It’s not that King’s assassination is unimportant. It says a lot about America that we had a guy like Dr. King in this country, and that he was murdered. But his murder wasn’t about him, it was about our relationship to him. It was about what other people did to him. Specifically, it was about what one man with a gun did to him. These people wanted to build a memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King, but it seemed to me they were building a monument to to the accomplishments of James Earl Ray.

(The Lorraine Hotel is now the National Civil Rights Museum, which seems like a much better much better way to honor Dr. King and his work.)

I got to thinking about all this after reading Scott Greenfield’s brilliant post about the controversy over building a Mosque near Ground Zero. Scott argues that Ground Zero and the location of the Mosque are worlds apart by Manhattan standards, and that people who don’t actually know the area from personal experience shouldn’t be telling folks in Manhattan what to do. In particular, he’s not impressed by the 9/11 families’ claims that the former site of the twin towers is “hallowed ground.”

(Scott also doesn’t like the phrase “Ground Zero,” and frankly neither do I. Ground zero is technical slang for the location on the Earth’s surface directly below an aerial explosion such as nuclear bomb. Its use for the site of the World Trade Center towers has always struck me as incorrect.)

I felt bad for people who lost loved ones in the terrors of 9/11, but I’ve found the whole “9/11 families” phenomenon a little disturbing. Again, as with the proposed memorial for Martin Luther King, it’s because the 9/11 families were brought together and united as a group by something that had nothing to do with them or the people they lost.

(Many of them would have known groups of the other families before 9/11 because their loved ones worked together. That does have to do with who they are and what they were about, so it’s not what I’m talking about here.)

After 9/11, I’m sure the families of the victims naturally came together in sharing their grief. But somewhere along the way, I think that unity got turned toward ends that were somewhat political. I don’t know where it started. Maybe reporters asked the family members for their opinions so many times that they selected people to speak for them, and those people became leaders. For some of them, it became a purpose in life, a reason to go on. But I’m sure other people saw that any claim of a connection to 9/11 was a way to draw attention and political power to themselves.

Then there was all the money. The September 11th Fund collected donations and eventually provided $500 million to the families, but that’s small change compared to the $7 billion they got from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. The latter was a government program, and it was far from a simple act of charity. Among other things, it was a bailout of sorts for the airlines whose planes were hijacked: In accepting money from the fund, families agreed not to sue the airlines. Naturally, the airlines wanted this fund to be as large as possible to discourage lawsuits. You can bet they lobbied Congress hard for this.

Lawyers scrambled to represent the families. Politicians learned that they could get publicity by calling for more compensation for the families. Pundits attracted attention to themselves by commenting on how terrible it all was.

When people started talking about a memorial at the site of the towers, I began to get the same feeling I had from the proposed Martin Luther King memorial. The people in the towers on 9/11 were insurance brokers and underwriters, bankers, tourists, car rental agents, lawyers, accountants, computer technicians, doctors, travel agents, and restaurateurs. They were husbands, wives, parents, siblings, and children. They had no idea 9/11 was coming, they had no plans to make a sacrifice or take a risk that day. So why honor them as if they did? Why unite them as if they had a common cause?

(This doesn’t apply to the first responders — police officers, firefighters, and EMTs — who showed up to help. They risked their lives to help others. This was a cause they all shared.)

If we’re going to honor the victims of 9/11, we should honor them for who they chose to be, not for what Al Qaeda made them. We shouldn’t turn the site of the World Trade Center into a monument to the vision of Osama bin Laden.

I’m probably projecting my own values into the situation too much, but I can’t help feeling that the 9/11 families have had their grieving process hijacked by the media, the politicians, and to some extent the American people. I’m not saying that their grief is unnatural or fake, but part of the grieving process is socially constructed. We do some things because people expect it of us, and when 300 million people are aware of your loss, you’ve got to feel some pressure.

The reverence people have for the site of the twin towers really surprises me. I don’t really get it. People talk about preserving the footprint of the towers, and not building anything there. It all just seems so technical and dry. I don’t understand the attachment to the location. I can understand why the location is painful and emotional and maybe cathartic to visit for people who lost a loved one, but I can’t understand the reverence.

I’ve tried to imagine how I’d feel if, say, my wife was killed in a car accident. How would I react to the location of the accident? I think I’d hate driving past the site, and would probably avoid it for a few years. But I wouldn’t revere it. It wouldn’t be hollowed ground for me.

And yet… When my father died, my wife and I took his ashes back to Kentucky where he was born. The last few hours of driving were off the interstate, on state roads winding through the hills and farms of eastern Kentucky, and I became accutely aware of passing small crosses that had been placed on the side of the road. I assume these were markers of locations where someone had been killed in a car accident.

I can kind of understand that. If someone I loved had died in one of those accidents, it would seem strange that the road appeared so normal. Here this important and terrible thing happened, and everything about the place is completely ordinary. It wouldn’t seem right.

On the other hand, I still don’t think I’d put up a marker. The location was the result of random chance, and it had nothing to do with the person who died.

All of this is not to say that there shouldn’t be a monument to the people murdered at the World Trade Center on 9/11. I’m just not sure that this should be it. I haven’t been following the planning of the 9/11 memorial, so I don’t know much about this, but it looks like they’re setting aside eight acres of Manhattan for the memorial, and they won’t be rebuilding any commercial buildings where the towers stood.

Somehow, it all seems like too much. By comparison, when the Eastland rolled over in the Chicago River in 1915, over 800 people died. The only memorial is this plaque (although there are plans for a slightly larger exhibit). Of course, almost four times as many people died on 9/11, and they died not in an accident but in an act of war, which does make a difference. Still, the 9/11 monument is half an acre larger than the National World War II Memorial.

I can’t escape the feeling that some people see memorializing 9/11 as a business and political opportunity, that some people who claim to represent the 9/11 families are really representatives only of their own self-interest, and that some people who claim to be honoring the dead are really trying to attract attention to themselves.

Or maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. Like I said, I really don’t understand how other people think about memorials and monuments. It only makes sense, therefore, that the things other people plan won’t have much appeal to me, nor should they. When it comes to building the 9/11 memorial, no one should give much thought to pleasing someone who feels as I do. Nothing they do there is going to upset me much.

Still, I wish they’d do something. It’s been almost nine years since the towers fell. That’s four years longer than it took to build the towers or almost a third of the time they were standing. Looking at the construction site webcam as I write this, night has fallen, and imprints of the towers are just two dark holes in the ground. It sure looks like what Osama bin Laden wanted.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Memorializing 9/11

I’ll begin with his all-time favorite singer, Mahalia Jackson, singing “When the Saints Go Marching In”:

Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass perform “A Walk In The Black Forest”:

Tom Jones sings “Green Green Grass of Home”:

Jim Neighbors sings “Dream the Impossible Dream”:

Marty Robbins sings “Red River Valley”

Roy Orbison sings “Blue Bayou”:

Mahalia Jackson sings “How Great Thou Art”:

Jim Neighbors sings “Go Tell It On The Mountain”:

Roy Orbison sings “Pretty Woman”:

Marty Robbins sings “I Walk Alone”:

Since this is a bit of a memorial for my father, I reckon someone’s got to sing “Amazing Grace.” Again, here’s Mahalia Jackson:

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Music For My Dad

McWilliams was very sick with AIDS and cancer, and the medicines he used made him nauseated, which he was able to ameliorate by smoking marijuana. The DEA charged McWilliams with various crimes in connection with a medical marijuana operation. Forbidden by the judge from mentioning his medical condition in court, he was forced to plead guilty and hope for leniency. While out on $250,000 bond for sentencing, and refraining from using marijuana as a condition of the bond secured by his mother’s house, he apparently vomited and choked to death.

I only know of McWilliams through his amazing book, Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Country. It’s a passionate cry for freedom, the simple human freedom to do what we want as long as no one else gets hurt. Go ahead and click the link. That’s not an Amazon page, that’s the entire book, posted online for free the way McWilliams wanted it.

This book has been a huge influence on my personal moral philosophy. I had already come to an intellectual conclusion that things like the War on Drugs were wrong, but I hadn’t really internalized the idea. Then I read a section in Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do where McWilliams describes getting a ticket for a traffic violation and later getting busted for smoking marijuana. He points out that the traffic violation presented a genuine danger to his fellow human beings, but using drugs harmed no one other than perhaps the user, so despite what the cops and the legislature and almost everyone thought, the traffic violation was the greater crime. In fact, using drugs was no crime at all. I realized that this crazy idea was something I could believe. And it changed everything.

The other thing I remember about McWillaims is his astonishment at the types of people who fought on the dark side:

I write these things and feel myself in mortal combat with a gnarly monster; then I remember the human faces of the kind people who tried to make me comfortable with small talk as they went through my belongings as neatly as they could. Then I remember, painfully, that the War on Drugs is a war fought by decent Americans against other decent Americans, and these people rifling through my belongings really were America’s best — bright young people willing to die for their country in covert action. It takes a special kind of person for that, and every Republic must have a generous number of them in order to survive.

But instead of our best and our brightest being trained to hunt down terrorist bombs or child abductors — to mention but two useful examples — our misguided government is using all that talent to harass and arrest Blacks, Hispanics, the poor, and the sick — the casualties in the War on Drugs, the ones that, to quote Leonard Cohen again, “sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.” It is the heart of the evil of a prohibition law in a free country. After all, picking on someone with AIDS and cancer is a little redundant, don’t you think?

On the way out, one of the DEA agents said, “Have a nice day.”

I believe the comment was sincere.

I never know what to make of that. Oh, I understand what McWilliams was saying, and I think it’s probably true. It’s a mistake to think these people are stupid, and it’s probably unhelpful to think of them as evil. But sometimes that just makes it all the more hopeless: How can these “decent Americans” not understand that they are hurting people for no reason?

Peter’s gone now, but in his short time on earth he influenced a lot of people, and his ideals live on in so many of us. I wish he was still here to see some of it.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Peter McWilliams, Ten Years Gone

Today’s not really a great day for me. It was a year ago today that my mother died. The trouble actually started two weeks earlier when she went into the hospital. That’s when she really disappeared. But today’s the first anniversary of the day she died.

All in all, this is the end of a rough year for me. I lost both my parents, I lost months of my time, I lost some income, and I spent a lot of money I didn’t have on things I suddenly needed. It was also kind of depressing, in the clinical sense. I know that depression can sneak up on you, but you know what? Depression snuck up on me.

I thought I was okay. A little sad and a little tired, maybe, but basically okay.

However, over the past month or so, as this anniversary approached, I noticed that I’m starting to take control of my life: Fixing things around the house, replacing busted backup disks on my computer, getting excited about my job again, bringing my personal financial records up to date (yikes!), thinking about taking up photography again…I’m even blogging more.

At the time, I didn’t realize I was doing any of these things less, but comparing how I was six months ago to how I am now, it’s pretty obvious that I went through a mild depression that seems to be waning.

(I say “seems” because, for all I know, in another six months I’ll be blogging about how depressed I was now.)

Anyway, I just want to give thanks to everyone who stuck with me, both here in the blogosphere and in real life. I’m glad to have all of you in my life.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at It’s Been a Year…

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Veteran’s Day Blues

He wrote a book (book) called

.Tootsie and what I feel is one the best written comedies of my time – Oh, God!. He also had great success in movies with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum He wrote the book (script) for the Stephen Sondheim musical

, alongside the likes of Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner & Woody Allen to name a few.Your Show of Shows, which became Caesar’s Hour, but he wrote for Sid Caesar on M*A*S*H and my list included Larry Gelbart.  Larry Gelbart is probably best known for writing and directing the TV series giants of comedyA while back, I wrote about my list of the   Laughing Matters: On Writing M*A*S*H, Tootsie, Oh, God!, and a Few Other Funny Things.  , but if you can find it at the library or used bookstore, I highly recommend it.It’s out of print

Larry Gelbart died Friday morning after a long battle with cancer.  He was 81. The world is a whole lot less funny without him. Thankfully, we still have his comic legacy.

This post by GaryO at Windypundit was originally published at Larry Gelbart, R.I.P.

Nobel prize winning agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug died yesterday at the age of 95. If history is just, people a thousand years from now should still be talking about him. I wrote about him here.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Norman Borlaug, R.I.P.

Larger ImageBurnett Draughn, 1919 - 2009

My father, Burnett Draughn, was born in on Decoration Day, May the 30th, in 1919, somewhere near Daniel’s Branch, Kentucky. He was Joe and Melissa Draughn’s eighth child out of an eventual total of ten. My dad liked to say that he had nine brothers and sisters, and every one of them also had nine brothers and sisters.

Burnett is an unusual first name. His parents had named him after a local Baptist preacher who they must have admired. Not too long after my father was born, according to family legend, Burnett the preacher robbed the post office and took off for parts unknown.

My father grew up on a farm, where he did some horseback riding, took care of the animals, and sometimes had to go out hunting for the family’s dinner. Squirrel mostly, to hear him tell it.

He went to school in Hindman, but later he was sent to the Pine Mountain Settlement School, a boarding school founded by philanthropists to help educate poor children in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky. I suspect it was a little bit like a modern youth home, except that it was in the Appalachian mountains, and that it was considered normal to teach troubled youths such handy skills as how to blow things up with dynamite.

When he was 17 years old, my father took off and lied about his age to join the Army. A couple of years ago, I saw some paperwork from the Veteran’s Administration that still showed his birth year as 1918.

Burnett was a big farm boy and used to hard work, so the Army soon had him carrying a BAR—a Browning Automatic Rifle—which is a heavy .30 caliber machine gun. In addition to the usual reasons army units have machine guns, my father also filled the role of air defense. If they were attacked by enemy aircraft, he was supposed to try to shoot them down.

Later on, the Army found out he could ride a horse pretty good, so they sent him to a pack artillary unit in Panama, where the Army used horses to haul artilliary through the mountains. His unit did have one truck available, though. They used it to carry food for the horses.

My father mustered out and went home, only to join up again a few years later as World War II started. He was sent overseas, and I gather he arrived in Italy after the controversial landing at Anzio. Eventually he ended up with the 44th Infanty Division in France, chasing the German army through the Vosges mountains, which he remembered as being very beautiful.

(My mother once told me that my father’s unit saw the Nazi death camp at Dachau, but he’s never talked about it with me.)

After returning from the war, my father married Thelma Jean Chalk and they had a son named Burnett Lee and a daughter named Sue Jean. The marriage ended badly, and my father moved away.

In the early 1960’s, Burnett found himself in Chicago, where he met a woman named Elizabeth Kielkiewicz. They got married, and by May of 1964 they had their only child, a boy they named Mark.

Through the years, my father has held a bunch of jobs. Among other things, he’s worked as a truck driver, a salesman, and a security guard. During most of my life, however, he worked in the dockyards of various trucking companies—P.I.E., Terminal Transport, and American Freight Systems are the only ones I remember—loading and unloading trucks until he retired at the age of 67. That’s a lot of hard muscle work. I remember he had a handshake like iron.

He mostly worked the night shift, which allowed my mother to work days without leaving me alone in the house, although I can remember a period where I had an hour to myself each day. I didn’t get to see much of him, since he was rarely home for long when I got home from school.

We went on a few long driving vacations, mostly to Kentucky to visit the family—Louisville for my Aunt Mary Elizabeth, Pikeville for my Uncle Hagan and his children. I can remember long drives through the hills of Kentucky. One time we picked up a couple of hitchhikers, and another time we ran out of gas.

On one of the trips we were on a long stretch of open road, and my father decided to see how fast the car would go. He got our 1969 Plymouth Valiant up to an even 100 miles per hour. Just a few months ago, he told me that he realized this was not a smart thing to do—if one of our cheap street tires had blown, we’d all have died—but I told him it was a vivid and fun memory for me.

One summer we drove to Washington, D.C.—I remember we toured the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, the Capitol Building, the White House, and the FBI building. We were really impressed by the new subway system, which was much prettier than our own CTA. Of course, we returned home through Kentucky.

My dad enjoyed playing card games, and was something of a card sharp in his younger days. I remember long hours of he and my mother and I playing 500 Rummy around the kitchen table. He also like to play the horses occasionally, although later he switched to the state lottery.

My father was always looking to “work the angles” in any situation. This meant trying to figure out any tricks that could be pulled. He wasn’t very good at tricking other people, but he was good at spotting other people trying to trick him. I remember one afternoon as a child when I had a friend over to play one of my games that used marbles. When we were done, as my friend was getting ready to leave, my dad came over and laughingly picked him up and held him upside down. Marbles fell out of his pockets.

After he retired, my father used to like to run errands around the neighborhood, stopping to chat with everyone he ran into. For a while he used to tell all the ladies that he wanted to give them a kiss, then he’d hand them a piece of Hershey’s Kiss chocolate.

In recent years, my dad spent much of his time watching MSNBC and CSPAN. He followed politics a lot, and he was a life-long Yellow Dog Democrat: There were some Democrats he didn’t like, but I never heard him say anything nice about a Republican. When I took him to the V.A. hospital, he would always ask me to turn his wheelchair away from the portrait of George Bush in the waiting area. I’m glad he lived to see the Democrats retake the White House.

Over the years, my dad had a few important pieces of advice: Don’t buy cheap stuff because quality always pays off in the long run. Always treat every gun as if it’s loaded, and never point it at another person unless you want to kill them. Don’t let cops in the house unless they have a warrant. If you’re setting off explosives with a burning fuse and they don’t go off when you expect, wait a while before you go to check it out because the fuse may still be smoldering.

Only that first one has really proven useful.

When my mom died in April, I moved in with my dad to take care of him for a couple of months until we could find a nursing home. In May, just a few days before his 90th birthday, we took him to Norwood Crossing nursing home, located about 15 minutes from my house.

At the age of 90, he had some problems with his memory, his time sense was messed up, and he had a few crazy ideas. He wasn’t all there, but he could hold short conversations, and if the subject interested him enough, he’d remember it the next time we saw him.

During the next few weeks, he started to settle in. He was eager to take physical therapy to keep walking. He was starting to make friends with some of the other residents, and he’d sing aloud to the ladies when they wheeled him through the hall.

In mid-June, however, he suddenly got much more confused. This change in mental state happened overnight, and the concerned staff sent him to the hospital. After a bunch of tests, his doctors found a restricted blood flow to part of his brain and said he’d probably had another stroke. There was nothing to do but send him back to the nursing home.

For a while, my dad was very agitated, but he began to settle down. Then he began to get too quiet, and by last Monday he was barely about to get up the energy to speak. On Wednesday night, my wife visited him, and she told me afterward that she had a feeling he didn’t have long in this world. On Thursday, his daughter Sue called him, and he was barely able to talk. He told her he thought he was dying.

On Saturday morning he had breakfast as usual. He listened to his music for a while until the staff helped him sit up on the edge of the bed to eat lunch. Afterwards, they put him back down for a nap.

Around 3 pm one of the staff was in his room and noticed he wasn’t breathing. Burnett Draughn had passed away in his sleep.

He too will be missed.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Burnett Draughn, Rest In Peace

• Keeping track of everything going on would have been so much harder without the internet and mobile phones.
• My dad was in a VA hospital, and my mother was in a private for-profit hospital. I don’t think it’s just libertarian bias that makes me like the private hospital much better.
• I completely lost interest in watching House while my mom was in the hospital. It hasn’t returned.
• It was incredibly frustrating trying understand what the doctors were saying about my mother’s chances. They hate to say there’s no real hope, even when there’s no real hope.
• The hospice workers, on the other hand, were very clear. It was a relief to be given a direct answer to a direct question.
• On my mother’s last day, a hospice nurse called to tell me that based on certain signs, my mother was “actively dying.” What a strange turn of phrase that is…yet obvious in its meaning.
• My mother died on the exact same day of the year as my wife’s mother.
• My mother was quite vehement that she wanted no funeral or memorial ceremony. She stopped going to other people’s funerals many years ago—she couldn’t stand having to remember them all that way—and so she didn’t want a ceremony for herself either. My wife and I are okay with her choice, but I think some of my mom’s friends are a little disappointed. I can understand that. But I also know what my mother wanted.
• Empty funeral homes are creepy. I’ve seen way too many horror movies.
• When we were talking with the funeral director, she asked us if we wanted a notice in the newspaper. I thought about it—perhaps people who know my mother but weren’t in her address file would find out about her if we put in a notice—but ultimately decided it wouldn’t do much good. As it happens, my eulogy for my mother is the top result for her name on Google and Yahoo. I don’t think a routine death notice could have done that.
• My mother died of pneumonia, probably caused by an infection. You don’t catch infectious diseases from nowhere. You catch them from other people. Since my mother rarely left her home, she must have caught it from a visitor. I wonder which one of us it was.
• I keep stumbling over phrases like “my parents’ apartment” and “mom and dad’s place.” That’s probably going to happen for a while.
• I’ve had a few of those moments where I imagine my mom’s reaction when I tell her something and then remember that I can’t.
• Then there are those times where I remember something I was supposed to do for my mother but kept forgetting. Over maybe two seconds I go through feeling upset with myself for not doing it, then feeling relieved that it no longer matters, then feeling guilty that I felt relieved.
• When I moved into my parents’ place, I was pretty careful not to disturb the operation of the household. I tried to always put everything back the way it was, and I bought the exact same groceries my mother had. I’m slowly realizing there are things I can change, such as putting pots and dishes on high shelves and buying gallons of milk instead of the half-gallons my mother could lift. I can also rearrange the couch cushions and leave the remote control wherever I want.
• We’re starting to clean my mother’s stuff out of the apartment. My mother had a lot of keepsakes, and it feels very wrong to contemplate throwing away things that she held onto for thirty or forty years. It’s the most vivid reminder of her passing. I’ll probably keep a few of her things for no good reason.
• It doesn’t bother me that it’s Mother’s Day…but I’m glad all the Mother’s-Day-themed commercials are over.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at On Mom’s Passing

If the world was a fairer place, Mrs. Heinlein would be 93, today, and in good health.  A very nice woman.

Which reminds me of a story. 

So, there I was, pounding away at the keyboard, when the phone rang.  It was my daughter Judy’s science teacher.

“Uh-oh,” I said, and “hold one.”  I knew I was going to need at least one cigarette, and probably a drink.  “What did she do now?”

“You’re not going to believe this one.”

It hadn’t been a great year.  Homework hadn’t been done, or had been ‘lost’.  Classes skipped, authority constantly challenged — well, that was okay, by and large, but . . . — and then there was the series of excuses with my name signed to them, written in my style, and which I had nothing to do with.  Catch Me If You Can wasn’t supposed to be a training film, you know.

“Okay.  Issue?”

“The usual.  Her homework is not in.  You’re not going to believe her excuse this time.”

I sighed.  “Okay.”  Missed another connection at JFK?  Fifth grandmother died?  What?

“She claimed that she couldn’t get to it this morning because she was too busy chatting online with Mrs. Heinlein.  Virginia Heinlein.  Robert Heinlein’s widow.”

“Well, she does have to do her homework, but, yeah, she was.  They do that pretty much every morning.  Mrs. Heinlein looks forward to it, she says.  I know Judy does; first thing in the morning, she gets to Instant Messenger and they talk for awhile.” 

Long pause.  “Really?”

“Yeah.  She still has to get her homework done, but, yeah.”

“What do they talk about?”

Asshole.  “Would you eavesdrop on Mrs. Heinlein’s private conversations with a young friend of hers?”

“No, of course — “

“Me, neither.”

“I mean, I, err, well, but, sheesh, and . . . “

“I know.”

He managed to get off the phone, not completing a sentence.  Understandable.  I got on Instant Messenger.  Mrs. Heinlein was on, and I ratted Judy out.

There was a long pause, and then . . .

May I still chat with her in the mornings?  I so enjoy our conversations.

Of course, Ginny.  (She had long before told Felicia and me — among many others — to call her “Ginny,” and it was all I could do not to answer, “I’d be honored to call you Ginny, Mrs. Heinlein.”  She was like that.)

Thank you so much, Joel.

My pleasure, Ginny.

Talk turned to other things. I think that was the day I told her my Pournelle story, and she told me about how she’s made Jerry’s jaw drop by opening her pocketbook.  (Other stories, for other days.  Remind me.)

Every morning after, when Judy would sign on to Instant Messenger, a message would pop up.

Judy, is your homework up to date?

Yes, Mrs. Heinlein.

Every morning.

Agnostic that I am, I don’t have any strong opinion about life after death and such, but it would be kind of nice to think that maybe, somewhere, she’s reading this and thinking fondly of me and my kid.

We surely are thinking fondly of her, and not just once a year, either.

So:  Happy Birthday, Ginny.  Please pass along my respects to the Man Who Traveled in Elephants. 

This post by Joel Rosenberg at Windypundit was originally published at Happy Birthday, Ginny.

I want to thank the nursing staff of Adventist La Grange Memorial Hospital, including especially Barb, Malou(?), Soon, Rose, and several more whose names escape me but who were no less helpful. I appreciate all the time you spent taking care of my mother and explaining things to me.

Thanks also to my mother’s doctors, for doing what they could.

I especially want to thank one doctor, whose name also escapes me. She was an Indian woman from the pulmonology service who explained the advantages and disadvantages of putting my mother on a respirator. As a non-physician, making these kinds of decisions for my mother was like standing at a fork in the road and having to choose a path without knowing what lies in either direction. More than any other doctor, this kind and patient young woman drew us a map of what might lay ahead. I will be forever greatful for her guidance.

I also want to thank the kind people at St. Thomas Hospice—I remember the names Ellyn and Linda—for the kind and straightforward way they explained the dying process, and especially for making my mother comfortable at the end.

Thanks also to our friends Ken and Kelly and Charlie for taking care of my father while my wife and I were busy with so much else. Ken also gets credit for building the computer I’m using to stay in touch. Thanks also go out to Tom at the Home Instead senior care service for setting up some additional care for my dad on such short notice.

Thanks to Christie at the American Cremation Society, operating out of Rago Brothers funeral home, for taking care of all the final arrangements for a very reasonable price.

Thanks to all my mother’s friends who’ve said such nice things about her, and thanks to all of you readers who left us such kind words in your comments here and on my Facebook page.

Finally, I must thank my wife Love Ann for seeing me through all of this. She has been a source of comfort and strength without which I would have crumbled. I would especially like to thank her for taking over, without my having to ask, the task of notifying our friends and relatives. I’m not good at talking to people under the best of conditions, and contacting so many people about such a painful subject would have undone me.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Thank You

Mom did that.  She inspired deep and sincere love and she gave it back tenfold.  She shared so many stories over the years.  Some of my favorites were stories that she told of her mother and father.  Her mother has been gone for about 30 years (maybe more) but every single time she spoke of her mom, it was with both a light and a sadness at the same time.  She loved and respected her mother and took care of her until her death (sometime in the 70’s).  She adored her father.  He was clearly the single most influential man in her 86 years.  He has been gone for at least 50 (maybe 60 years).  He died suddenly and she was never able to get over the pain of losing him.  She spoke of his kindness, and felt his love and protection every day they were together.  To the day she died, she believed her father watched over her, and I believe it too.

She had fun.  As a teenager, she wore scandalous panty hose and red lipstick when it was thought that only fast girls did that, and boy did she enjoy telling me about how much fun it was!

I learned recently that she had her heart broken as a young woman.  It surely didn’t keep her from loving again, stronger and deeper.  I do truly think that she viewed her son and the relationship that she had with him as the healing balm to several old wounds.  It became clear to me that by letting me into her life, she was – in a way – gifting me with her greatest love, her son Mark – my husband.

Her son was the light of her life.  They were truly partners in crime, in the sweetest sense of the word.  From her Mark learned that innate curiosity was a good thing.  His incredible thirst for knowledge and information, his desire to learn new and different things, all came from her.  She welcomed every opportunity to both teach him and to let him learn on his own.  He tells me stories that he would ask her “Mom, what is this for???” and she would respond “Look it up” or “Get a book on it from the library.”  The difference between her reaction and other mom’s is that she would then put action to words.  She would take him on adventures, to the library or bookstore or wherever they needed to go to get the answer.  Through her son, I was gifted with a small degree of that curiosity which has caused me to expand my horizons and for that I am grateful.

We didn’t always agree and she was truly one of the most stubborn women that I’ve ever met.  The biggest argument that we ever had was, ironically, about her last wishes.  Mom and dad asked Mark and I to put together legal health and power of attorney paperwork that would allow us to be there for them when they needed a greater degree of assistance and they didn’t want us to experience any difficulties when working on their behalf.  When it came time to discuss her final wishes, she said that she wanted to be cremated.

At the time (and even to some degree now) that seemed strange to me.  I’ve experienced quite a bit of death in my life.  My mom, dad, grandmother and grandfather have all passed.  I told her that I wanted to have a wake and a funeral (because that is what I’ve always done).  She was mad and said that she really wanted to just be cremated and have her ashes scattered over her father’s grave.  I told her that we would cremate her, but that “You’ll be dead, you won’t know or care what I do and I want to have a wake when you die.”

Let me tell you, you haven’t seen pissed until you’ve seen 5’4″ of pissed off 84 year old Polish woman.  Her words were something like, “If I can’t trust you to accept my wishes when I’m gone, how can I trust you when I’m still living.”  Boy-o-boy, did that hit home.  Round 1 to the little pissed off Polish woman.  I apologized and told her that I would fight for her right to leave this world in whatever manner she wanted.

So on Wednesday of this week, we are going to the funeral home to pick up the ashes of my beloved mother-in-law.  We will make every effort to follow her wishes to the letter.

Mom, I will remember you every single day for the rest of my life and I will never ever see chamomile tea, potpourri or pipe-cleaners without thinking of you with the same love that you showed me every single time we were together.

This post by Love Ann Dougherty at Windypundit was originally published at A Note From the Daughter-In-Law

Larger ImageElizabeth Draughn, 1922 - 2009

My mother was born Elizabeth Kielkiewicz on December 9, 1922, right here in Chicago, the only daughter of two Polish immigrants. She grew up during the Great Depression, remembered where she was when the Japanese navy bombed Pearl Harbor, was amazed by the moon landing, and saw the beginning and end of the Cold War, and the dawn of the 21st century.

A lot of things happened to her along the way. None of them are very scandalous by today’s standards, but she probably wouldn’t want me writing too much about them, so I won’t. Besides, I’m sure I don’t know even half the stories.

Sometime in the early 1960’s, Elizabeth found herself back in Chicago, where she met a man named Burnett Draughn. They got married, and by May of 1964, they had their only child, a boy they named Mark.

(When she went into labor with me, my father had just returned from working the night shift and was sound asleep. Since the hospital was right across the street, she seriously considered not waking him because he didn’t really have to be there.)

My oldest memory of my mother is from when I was a very small child, no older than three. I remember being on the couch and burying my head against her side where I could be warm and comfortable.

I remember one Christmas when I had received a chemistry set as a gift. For several nights afterward, mom and I stayed up late at night doing chemistry experiments and eating pizza.

Mom drove me to school every morning, then some evenings we’d go out to my piano lessons (which never took) or a movie or some shopping. We went to the library a lot and she let me get as many books as we could carry. Sometimes we’d stop at a magic shop and I’d watch them do tricks. She bought a few tricks and taught me how to do them.

Mom drove our 1969 Plymouth Valiant. It was a classic grocery-getter when built, but by the mid-1970s the auto industry was making a lot of really bad cars, and its 225 slant-six was more powerful than the engines of a lot of new cars. My mom used to get a kick out of sitting at the light next to a new sporty-looking car and then punching it when the light changed, leaving them behind.

My mother had an extremely stubborn streak. On occasion, I may have overwhelmed her, or out-maneuvered her, and eventually simply outgrew her, but it was a rare day when I could change her mind about anything. Through judicious use of MTV (when they used to play music videos all day) I did convince her that rock-and-roll wasn’t all noise. I think she liked the Eurythmics best.

She was stubborn with other people too. A few years ago, a couple of FBI agents knocked on her door, looking for information about one of her neighbors. She refused to let them in, yelling through the door that she doesn’t let strangers into the house.

My mother worked for many years as a bookkeeper, back in the days before everything was computerized. I’ve been going through her finances, and they are very well organized. She kept the household cash in an envelope on which she wrote a transaction log explaining every instance where money was taken out.

Of course, my mom did all the usual mom things—cooking, laundry, and housekeeping—especially after she quit working. When my dad stopped being able to take care of himself very much, mom was his primary caregiver. She complained about it—she complained a lot—but she didn’t want dad to go into a nursing home, so she took care of him right up until the day before she went into the hospital.

Mom went into the hospital on Saturday, March 21st and was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, poor circulation in her extremities, and kidney problems. A little later, they decided she also had pneumonia.

As she received treatment over the next week, she began to improve—her blood oxygenation got better, her heart rate settled down, and her kidney function returned to almost normal. By Monday the 30th, I was discussing rehabilitation options with the hospital social worker.

It was not to last. She took a turn for the worse, and by Wednesday morning, her doctors were asking me whether to intubate her. Based on her long-expressed wish that she not be “kept alive by a machine,” we chose not to. By Friday, it was clear there was nothing that could be done, so we let them make her as comfortable as possible.

Elizabeth Draughn passed from this world on Saturday, April 4, sleeping peacefully in bed, with my wife and I holding her hands.

She will be missed.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Elizabeth Draughn, Rest In Peace

This book is about a single idea—consenting adults should not be put in jail unless they physically harm the person or property of a nonconsenting other.

He calls laws that violate this principle “consensual crimes” rather than the more common “victimless crimes” because he feels the latter has too much baggage—from people claiming that it’s a victimless crime to steal from a corporation, to lawyers pointing out that some crimes technically have no victims, to moral scolds who insist that “we are all victims”—whereas “consensual crimes” focuses on the key issue, which is the consent of all involved.

McWilliams goes on to elaborate on this idea for hundreds of pages. I could quibble with some of the details, but this book has had a strong influence on my moral philosophy. I think his main point is completely correct, and it continues to shape my beliefs about the proper goals and limits for our system of justice. Consensual crimes should not be crimes at all.

The experience of browsing through the whole Peter McWilliams site is a little spooky. It’s got his books online, a short biography of Peter McWilliams, and even a place to sign up for his e-mail list. But there’s one very important piece of information that doesn’t appear anywhere on any page. This is a zombie site. Peter McWilliams has been dead for eight years.

In 1996, he was diagnosed with AIDS and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The medicine he used to treat these diseases made him extremely nauseated, a condition he was able to ameliorate by smoking marijuana. During this time he became an outspoken advocate of medical marijuana.

Possibly as a response to that advocacy, the DEA arrested McWilliams and another man, charging them with various crimes in connection with a medical marijuana operation. Forbidden by the judge from mentioning his medical condition in court, he was forced to plead guilty and hope for leniency. While out on $250,000 bond for sentencing, and refraining from using marijuana as a condition of the bond secured by his mother’s house, he apparently vomited and choked to death.

A memorial site for Peter McWilliams has this quote from his essay “Joy is Good”:

In March 1996, I opened the door to death and stared the Grim Reaper in the face. There was a pause. Then he suddenly smiled and said, “Enjoy yourself! It’s later than you think.”

William F. Buckley eulogized Peter McWilliams as “a wry, mythogenic guy, humorous, affectionate, articulate, shrewd, sassy.”

It’s hard to imagine a more ironic death for such a generous spirit, a man who wanted so much for people to be free. It all sounds like some bad made-for-TV movie on the Lifetime channel. Some part of me thinks that Peter would probably appreciate the irony.

I’ve decided to link to Peter McWilliams’s site under new blogroll category that will probably grow as I and my fellow denizens of the internet get older: Gone But Not Forgotten.

Although the category’s purpose is to remember those who inspired us, enthralled us, and entertained us, it also serves a purpose in this case that Peter might not approve of. It is a reminder that Peter was essentially murdered by a bunch of drug warriors, and that the kinds of people who did that to him should also not be forgotten. Nor forgiven.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Peter McWilliams

My wife used to work for the Chicago office of Aon Consulting. A couple of times, she visited the company’s offices in New York City, and met a bunch of people there, including a Senior Vice President named Jim Berger. She liked him and thought he was a great guy.

The Aon offices in New York were located high up in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. They lost 175 people that day, including Jim Berger. When the first plane hit the other tower, he started evacuating his employees. Jim Berger was last seen in the elevator lobby, helping people get out of the tower.

Berger’s favorite song was Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road.” Springsteen heard about this and sent the Berger family a video of a special solo performance, which was played at his memorial service.

I didn’t personally know anyone who died in the attacks of 9/11, so the fact that my wife knew Jim Berger is as close as I come to a 9/11 connection. I don’t claim to have any strong feelings about his death, but when September 11 comes around, I end up thinking about him.

If any of Berger’s family or friends come across this post, please don’t take this the wrong way, but I wish I didn’t have to think about Jim Berger.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Jim Berger

Someone broke into the Sept. 11 memorial near Naperville City Hall and stole a piece of concrete that had been part of the Pentagon, police said.

The theft occurred Wednesday, police said.

Naperville CrimeStoppers is offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

The memorial honors victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including Navy Cmdr. Dan Shanower, 40, a Naperville native who was one of 125 people who died at the Pentagon.

I encountered the Dan F. Shanower memorial in 2005 and took a few pictures which I used in a memorial day post.

Though presumably accurate, the story is slightly confusing because it makes it sound like the thief broke into a building to steal the pieces of the Pentagon when in fact the memorial is outside and in the open.

Larger ImageDan F. Shanower Memorial

From the description, I think this is what they’re talking about:

Larger ImagePieces Of the Pentagon

The little clear boxes contain fragments from the Pentagon. I guess someone broke open one or more of the boxes and stole the chunks of concrete from inside.

I imagine it was just some kid screwing around, but with a front-page article in the Chicago Tribune, it’s probably drawing more heat than he expected.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Theft At the Shanower Memorial

Although the man was a huge influence on economic thinking, I never read much of his writing. My self-imposed education in the basics of economics came well after he made his major contributions, so by the time I encountered his writings, I had already learned many of his ideas from other sources.

The New York Times obituary for him is long but worth reading if you’re interested in the recent history of economic thinking.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Milton Friedman, R.I.P.

In additional to blogging the story, I also emailed her a brief note telling her that I admired her fortitude at such a difficult time, and expressing my sympathy for her loss. I wasn’t expecting her to respond—she has a lot more important things to do than send out Thank You notes to online strangers—and I didn’t get a response.

Until now.

Her email is about 400 words long and starts with an apology for not getting back to me sooner. She’s been busy attending memorials for her husband and setting up the Steven Vincent Foundation. Then she thanked me for my note, expressed her hope that I’ve read her husband’s book (In The Red Zone) and told me how much she misses him. She closes by asking me to spare a thought for Steven Vincent and his message.

I’m paraphrasing rather than just posting the message because I never told her I’d be posting the response. I wasn’t expecting a response at all, except maybe a polite “thank you.” I sure didn’t expect a personal note. I’m a bit stunned by such graciousness.

Update: I asked Mrs. Ramaci-Vincent for some more information about the Steven Vincent Foundation and she tells me that it will aid the families of murdered journalists and stringers from the developing world. Unlike Western journalists, these people do not have large media corporations and life insurance to provide for their families if they are killed. In addition, the foundation will also help women living in dangerous parts of the world. She’s still working on setting up a proper 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation and getting a web site up and running. Meanwhile you can find out a little more information at Kesher Talk, especially in the BlogAds to the right.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Lisa Ramaci-Vincent

Independent journalist Steven Vincent was killed in Basra a few weeks ago.

Professor Juan Cole at the University of Michigan (who had previously been the subject of criticism by Vincent) looked into rumors that Vincent was having an affair with his female Iraqi translator, Nour Weidi, and suggested strongly that Vincent was the subject of an honor killing because of his ignorance of Islamic ways.

Now, Steven Vincent’s American wife has set the record straight in a letter she’s sent to several people. She really tears into Juan Cole in several places, but that’s not the amazing part.

Read what Steven Vincent and Nour Weidi were really up to:

“Was American journalist Steve Vincent killed in Basra as part of an honor killing? He was romantically involved with his Iraqi interpreter, who was shot 4 times. If her clan thought she was shaming them by appearing to be having an affair outside wedlock with an American male, they might well have decided to end it. In Mediterranean culture, a man’s honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men. Where a woman of the family sleeps around, it brings enormous shame on her father, brothers and cousins, and it is not unknown for them to kill her. These sentiments and this sort of behavior tend to be rural and to hold among the uneducated, but are not unknown in urban areas. Vincent did not know anything serious about Middle Eastern culture and was aggressive about criticizing what he could see of it on the surface, and if he was behaving in the way the Telegraph article describes, he was acting in an extremely dangerous manner.”

Mr. Cole –

(I refuse to call you professor, because that would ennoble you. And please change the name of your blog to “Uninformed Comment”, because that is precisely what the above paragraph is.)

I would like to refute this shameful post against a dead man who can no longer defend himself against your scurrilous accusations, a dead man who also happened to be my husband. Steven Vincent and I were together for 23 years, married for 13 of them, and I think I know him a wee bit better than you do.

For starters, Steven and Nour were not “romantically involved”. If you knew anything at all about the Middle East, as you seem to think you do, then you would know that there is no physical way that he and she could have ever been alone together. Nour (who always made sure to get home before dark, so they were never together at night) could not go to his room; he could not go to her house; there was no hot-sheet motel for them to go to for a couple of hours. They met in public, they went about together in public, they parted in public. They were never alone. She would not let him touch her arm, pay her a compliment, buy her a banana on the street, hyper-aware of how such gestures might be interpreted by the mysogynistic cretins who surrounded her daily. So for you brazenly claim that she was “sleeping around,” when there is no earthly way you could possibly know that, suggests to me that you are quite the misogynist as well. Cheap shot, Mr. Cole, against a remarkable woman who does not in any wise deserve it.

This is not to say that Steven did not love Nour – he did. And he was quite upfront about it to me. But it was not sexual love – he loved her for her courage, her bravery, her indomitable spirit in the face of the Muslim thugs who have oppressed their women for years. To him she represented a free and democratic Iraq, and all of the hopes he had for that still-elusive creature. And he loved her for the help she gave him – endangering herself by affiliating with him because she wanted the truth to come out about what was happening in her native city of Basra and the surrounding area. Perhaps you are unaware of the fact that it is possible to love someone in a strictly platonic way, but I assure you, it can happen – even between men and women.

And yes, he was planning to to convert to Islam and marry Nour, but only to take her out of the country to England, where she had a standing job offer, set her up with the friends she had over there, divorce her, and come back to New York. He had gotten her family’s permission to do so (thereby debunking the “honor killing” theory), but more importantly, he had gotten mine. He called one night to say that it had been intimated to him that Nour’s life was essentially going to be worthless after he left; since he was an honorable man (a breed you might want to familiarize yourself with), he then asked what I thought he might do to help her. I told him to get her out of the country and bring her here to New York. However, the only way she could have left Iraq was with a family member or husband. Since her family had no intention of going anywhere, Steven was her only recourse, and it would have been perfectly legal for him to convert, marry her, then take her out of Iraq to give her a chance at a real life. (Now that that avenue is closed to her, I have made inquiries to the State Department about the possibility of my sponsoring her in America. Do you perhaps labor under the misapprehension I am such a spineless cuckold that I would do put myself out thusly for the woman you believe my husband was traducing me with? If so, I’m guessing you don’t know much about the Sicilian female temperament.)

As to your claim that “In Mediterranean culture, a man’s honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men”, it may perhaps have escaped your notice that Iraq does not abut, in any way, shape or form, the Mediterranean Sea. Italy is a Mediterranean culture, as are Spain, Greece, Southern France. In none of them is “honor killing” an accepted form of “protecting womanhood”. As to the southerly lands like Morocco and Algeria, they are not, in the general scheme of things, considered Mediterranean cultures – they are considered Arabic, a whole different beast. For you to seemingly be unaware of this, and then to say that my husband “did not know anything serious about Middle Eastern culture” again begs the question, just where do you get off? If you cannot differentiate between Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures, how is it you feel qualified to pontificate so pompously?

How often have you been to the Middle East, Mr. Cole? In 2000 Steven and I spent almost a month in Iran on vacation. In 2003 we spent 10 days over Christmas in Jordan. In the last 2 years he had made not one, not two, but three trips to Iraq, and at the time of his death had about 7 months of daily living there under his belt. Can you offer comparables?

How much Arabic do you speak, Mr. Cole? Steven had been learning Arabic for the last two years, and was able to converse simply but effectively with the people he came into contact with. He had many expatriate friends in the Muslim world from whom he was always learning. As I sit here writing this at what was his desk, I can look at the literally dozens of books he devoured about Islam and the Middle East – each one thick with Post-It notes and personal observations he made in the pages – as he sought to comprehend and absorb the complexities of the culture and the religion he felt, and cared, so deeply about. If you would like a list of them, please email me back and I will be happy to send you a comprehensive accounting.

Yes, Steven was aggressive in criticizing what he saw around him and did not like. It’s called courage, and it happens to be a tradition in the history of this country. Without this tradition there would have been no Revolutionary War, no Civil War, no civil rights movement, no a lot of things that America can be proud of. He had made many friends in Iraq, and was afraid for them if the religious fundamentalists were given the country to run under shari’a. You may dismiss that as naive, simplistic, foolish, but I say to you, as you sit safely in your ivory tower in Michigan with nothing threatening your comfy, tenured existance, that you should be ashamed at the depths to which you have sunk by libeling Steven and Nour. They were on the front lines, risking all, in an attempt to call attention to the growing storm threatening to overwhelm a fragile and fledgling experiment in democracy, trying to get the world to see that all was not right in Iraq. And for their efforts, Steven is dead and Nour is recuperating with three bullet wound in her back. Yes, that’s right – the “honorable” men who abducted them, after binding them, holding them captive and beating them, set them free, told them to run – and then shot them both in the back. I’ve seen the autopsy report.

You did not know him – you did not have that honor, and you will never have the chance, thanks to the muerderous goons for whom you have appointed yourself an apologist. He was a brilliant, erudite, witty, charming, kind, generous, silly, funny, decent, honorable and complex man, who loved a good cigar, Bombay Sapphire gin martinis, Marvel Silver Age comic books, Frank Sinatra, opera and grossing me out with bathroom humor. And if he was acting in a dangerous manner, he had a very good excuse – he was utterly exhausted. He had been in Basra for 3 months under incredibly stressful conditions, working every day, and towards the end enduring heat of 135 degrees, often without air conditioning, which could not have helped his mental condition or judgment. He was yearning to come home, as his emails to me made crystal clear. But on August 2nd, two days before my birthday, he made the fatal mistake of walking one block – one – from his hotel to the money exchange, rather than take a cab, and now will never come back to me. I got a bouquet of flowers from him on August 4th, which he had ordered before he died, and the card said he was sorry to miss my birthday, but the flowers would stand in his stead until he made it home. They are drying now in the kitchen, the final gift from my soulmate.

I did not see your blog until tonight. I was busy doing other things – fighting the government to get Steven’s body returned from Basra days after I was told he would be sent home, planning the funeral, buying a cemetary plot, choosing the clothes to bury him in, writing the prayer card, fending off the media, dealing with his aging parents, waking and then burying him – but I could not let the calumnies you posted so freely against two total strangers go unchallenged.

You strike me as a typical professor – self-opinionated, arrogant, so sure of the rightness of your position that you won’t even begin to consider someone else’s. I would suggest that you ought to be ashamed of yourself for your breathtaking presumption in eviscerating Steven in death and disparaging Nour in life, but, like any typical professor, I have no doubt that you are utterly shameless.

Sincerely,

Lisa Ramaci-Vincent

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at “It’s Called Courage”

James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original “Star Trek” TV series and movies who responded to the command “Beam me up, Scotty,” died Wednesday. He was 85.

Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Wash., home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease, he said.

I never knew much about Doohan. I do remember noticing at some point that he seemed to have lost a finger. This article explains that he was in the D-Day invasion and was hit by machinegun fire.

He was thrice married and a father of nine, the last of whom was born five years ago when Doohan was 80 years old.

Asked if he ever got tired of hearing “Beam me up, Scotty” he said:

“I’m not tired of it at all,” he replied. “Good gracious, it’s been said to me for just about 31 years. It’s been said to me at 70 miles an hour across four lanes on the freeway. I hear it from just about everybody. It’s been fun.”

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at One To Beam Up

Just before I left, I spotted, across the river, what looked like a whole wall with faces carved on it. I thought that might make a nice background for some pictures, so I snapped a shot of it to remind myself it was a possible shooting location.

When I reviewed the pictures a few days later, I noticed something in one small area of the photo:

Face Wall Detail

Is that an eternal flame? If this was a memorial of some kind, it would be disrespectful to use it as a background for a whimsical portrait.

A few days later, I went back to the Riverwalk and made a point of visiting the wall of faces. It was in fact a memorial, inscribed as follows:

Wall of Faces

Faces created by Naperville school children and molded by local artists to represent the casualties of September 11, 2001.

Here’s a better shot of most of the monument area:

9/11 Monument

You can see the wall of faces, the eternal flame, and the central jumble of granite and steel representing the crumbled buildings.

I didn’t pay much attention to the central figure of steel and granite, except to note several pieces of debris enclosed in glass:

Debris Protected by Glass

The was apparently the real thing, some part of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. I don’t know if you can tell in this picture, but the scarred granite is clearly carved to look that way: It’s not a piece of any of the real damaged buildings.

I then took a look at the twisted girder. An artist had bent it and cut jagged edges on it and leaned it against the carved granite to represent the fallen buildings. Pretty standard modern sculpture.

Until I stumbled on a detail that made me have to sit down:

Unknown Broken Part

This was no artist’s detail. Artists add things to a sculpture because they have meaning. The warp of the beam, the jagged edges, the dings and dents, all these could be explained as an artist’s representation of the battered building.

But why this? Why have this tiny, complicated, meaningless thing attached to the side of the sculpture? Unless it’s not a sculpture.

This was the real thing. A piece of steel that was once part of the World Trade Center, then part of the burning pile. Consecrated by heroism and death, cut loose, and brought to this peaceful place in the quiet suburbs of Chicago to remind us all of the events of that day.

I found a sign that explained it. The beam is from the World Trade Center and the small debris fragments are from the Pentagon. That granite is quarried from Pennsylvania, “symbolizing the freedom fighters of Flight 93,” which crashed in Pennsylvania.

There is also a placard, inscribed as follows:

Freedom Isn’t Free

In memory of Commander Dan F. Shanower and the thousands of others who died in the attack on America on September 11, 2001.

Dan Shanower grew up in Naperville, attended Disctrict 203 schools and graduated from Naperville Central High School in 1979. He was commissioned a naval officer in 1985. He was killed at his Pentagon post, serving as chief of the Intelligence Plot for the Chief of U.S. Naval Operations.

These are his words: “…Those of us in the military are expected to make the ultimate sacrifice when called…the military loses scores of personnel every year…Each one risked and lost his or her life in something they believed in, leaving behind friends, family and shipmates to bear the burden and celebrate their devotion to our country…Freedom isn’t free.” (Naval Institute Proceedings, May 1997)

If you’d like more information:

• Cmdr. Shanower’s full speech at the Naval Institute’s web site.
• Shanower’s page at Arlington National Cemetary.
• Messages from people who knew Dan Shanower.
• More about the creation of the Naperville Memorial.
• More about the dedication of the Naperville Memorial.
• A much better picture of the Naperville Memorial.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Freedom Isn’t Free