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Back in 2016 I wrote a blog called What If We Erase Our Past, a post that’s turned out to be very prophetic with everything that’s going on today.

Winston Churchill said, “I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”

In the last few days I’m sure you’ve heard about a number of companies dropping or modifying their long-time corporate symbols. One’s like Uncle Ben, Mrs. Butterworth, and several others.

And of course now, Aunt Jemima.

But there was a real person behind Aunt Jemima, a person who history should not be lost.

Nancy Green was a freed slave.  She was born into slavery in Montgomery County, Kentucky, on November 17, 1834. Part of her experience included cooking for the family of a judge and serving as a nurse for his two sons.

Eventually she moved to Chicago where through the years she perfected her cooking talents.

She took her talent and created a cooking brand.  R.T.Davis Milling Company bought her likeness almost a hundred years ago and created ‘Aunt Jemima’. It is currently owned by Quaker Oats.  She passed away in 1923 as one of America’s first black millionaires. 

Her career allowed Green the financial freedom to become an activist and engage in anti-poverty programs. She was one of the first African-American missionary workers. She used her stature as a spokesperson to become a leading advocate against poverty and in favor of equal rights for individuals in Chicago. She’s a hero and so is her brand.

You can read more about her story here, but why would anyone want to deny this?

So with all this, here’s a rerun of my article from back then.

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November 19, 2016

What If We Erase Our Past?

 

George Santayana famously said,“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Or maybe you like Mark Twain’s version better when he said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

But you can’t remember the past if it’s disappearing right before your eyes.

Stalin’s Communist regime was probably the first modern government to make a consistent effort to erase the photographic past, as seen in this famous comparison.

Makes you really appreciate how much harder this was in the pre-Photoshop days.

In Stalin’s case, whole Cabinets, as well as top generals, would just disappear from history. I guess this is what they mean by “Out of sight. Out of mind.” Poof! You’re gone.

And it wasn’t just the Russian Communists, but the Chinese Communists too.

Bo Gu, a protégé and senior adviser to Mao Tse-tung, apparently got on Mao’s bad side, and Bo and bunch of other senior leaders died in a plane ‘crash’ in 1946. Almost immediately, Bo and the others, AND the plane crash pretty much disappeared from history.

Even Hitler got in on the act when he was mad at Joseph Goebbels about something. Goebbels also disappeared from official photographs for a while until he got the message.

At least Goebbels only disappeared from photographs, and not permanently as most did.

Even the ancient Egyptians were not above erasing a Pharaoh from history. Akhenaten, son of Amenhotep III, husband of Nefertiti, and father to King Tutankhamun, or King Tut, as Steve Martin calls him, tried to move the populous away from the many different gods they worshiped to a belief in only one supreme god, Aten, the sun god.

Akhenaten even built a great new city dedicated to Aten called Amarna. But it only lasted about 10 years until Akhenaten’s death. Then the people and the priests revolted, reinstalled their pantheon of gods, and did their best to rid history of any mention of Akhenaten and Aten. They tore down the temples to Aten, destroyed Amarna, and even removed Akhenaten from all official king lists, even going so far as to chisel his name from all monuments and stonework.

And we see the same thing happening in the same area today with ISIS, the Taliban, etc., destroying ancient Mesopotamian relics because they’re not mentioned in the Koran, so they can’t be allowed to exist.

And now we see this happening in America today.

There seems to be a concerted effort to erase the Confederacy, the South, and even the Civil War from present day knowledge, to the point of pulling down mountains. Or at least mountainsides.

There has been a call to remove this sculpture from the side of Stone Mountain outside Atlanta.

Depicting Confederate President Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee and General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, at three acres it’s the largest high-relief sculpture in the world, even larger than Mount Rushmore. And some people want it dynamited or sandblasted to get rid of it.

And all over the South flags are coming down, and streets, parks, buildings, and even high school football teams are being renamed.

And on a somewhat more personal note, Vanderbilt University is spending $1.2 million to remove the word “Confederate” from “Confederate Memorial Hall” that’s on one of its buildings on the Peabody campus. I say ‘personal’, because I actually lived there for about six months.

In 1957 my mother went back to college to get her teaching degree, at the then Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, TN, one of the best schools in the south. At the time we lived down in Gulf Shores, AL, where my father was in the commercial shrimping business with seven of the big ocean-going shrimp boats. So my mother and I moved to Nashville for her school. We were supposed to be in family housing, but there was a delay due to a delay with new construction. So my mother, with the help of some college friends, snuck me into Confederate Hall.

I say ‘snuck’ because I wasn’t supposed to be there. You see, Confederate Hall was the women’s dorm – single female coed women. I kind of became a mascot, and the girls would help sneak me in and out to avoid being seen by the resident dorm ‘mothers’. And yes, I do remember seeing coeds in the hall in various states of undress.

Unfortunately I was NINE!  But I digress.

Confederate Memorial Hall was built in 1933 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and donated to Peabody with the stipulation that it always bear the name “Confederate Memorial Hall”. In fact early on it was reserved for the female descendants of Confederate veterans who were able to live there free.

Well, some years later Vanderbilt University took over Peabody, and since 2002 they has been trying to change the name of Confederate Hall but that pesky ‘stipulation’ kept getting in the way. But finally this past August 2015, Vanderbilt paid the United Daughters of the Confederacy $1.2 million (the equivalent of the $50,000 the UDC paid for its construction in 1933) and gained the right to remove the word ‘Confederate’ from the building and just call it ‘Memorial Hall’. Ironically they had already been calling it that in all their literature for years. So they paid $1.2 million to chisel some stone off a building that didn’t really change anything.

Is it just me, or would it not have made more sense to use the $1.2 million for minority scholarships? Did they ask anybody, “Do you not want to see the word “Confederate” or would you like a free scholarship?” Seems a pretty easy choice to me.

Finally I’m now waiting for someone to call for the renaming of Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. You see, the name Arlington comes from the ‘Arlington House’ estate which passed down from George Washington’s family to the wife of Robert E. Lee. Yeah, that one.

So at the beginning of the Civil War, the estate of Arlington House, and the present location of Arlington National Cemetery, was owned by Robert E. Lee.

Rename it quick before it offends.

So, are we becoming too Politically Correct?  If we erase all the bad things from our past, how will we know what to avoid next time.

Time will tell, I guess.

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Thought for the Day:

In 1913 Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Josip Tito, and Sigmund Freud were all living in Vienna, Austria at the same time. So maybe if Sigmund had been a better psychiatrist then, the world would be a better place now.

  

I’m looking for anyone who might have a DVD of Delorme’s 2015 Street Atlas program, the last version that came out before Garmin bought Delorme and discontinued Street Atlas.

When I recently upgraded to a new computer, I was able to find all my old software, either by re-downloading it or from a DVD, except for Street Atlas.

So if anyone has a copy of it I would appreciate it if I could borrow it, or if you could make a copy of it for me. I will, of course, pay for any expenses.

Thanks.

Another in our Where We Were 3 Years Ago Today series.

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June 17, 2017

Jan Got A Trifecta . . .

We were out the door about 10:45 this morning, leaving the Riverside RV Resort in Bartlesville to have lunch at Monterey’s Little Mexico, our first visit to one since we left the Houston area back in March.

We were kind of worried about how the food would compare to our one down in Dickinson. But it was just like home.

It even looked the same.

Everything from the salsa to the Chicken Tortilla Soup was just as good.

Leaving Monterey’s we headed back toward town to check out a few places, but our first stop was to get gas for the truck.

Seeing as how Bartlesville in the home of Phillips Petroleum, I guess it’s not surprising that every station in town seems to be a Phillips 66 one. But the prices are great too.

$1.79 for unleaded and $1.99 for diesel.

But here’s something I haven’t seen before.

Unleaded with Ethanol and 3 grades of gas with NO  ethanol.

Guess it helps to have your own refinery in town.

Next up we drove by the Frank Phillips home.

And then back to the other side of US 60 to get a better view of the Price Tower, the only skyscraper built to a Frank Lloyd Wright design.

The 19 story, 221 foot tall building, built as the headquarters for the H. C. Price Company, a local oil pipeline and chemical company, opened in 1956 to pretty much universal acclaim.

Very impressive.

As we’ve been driving around Bartlesville, we’ve noticed the local mascot statures.

Now as we’ve traveled around the country, we’ve seen mermaids in Beaufort, SC, pelicans in Seabrook, TX, moose in Coeur d’Alene, ID, bears in upper NY state, and now buffalo in Bartlesville, OK.

Very colorful buffalo.

We had next planned to drive out to the Woolaroc Museum and Wildlife Preserve, but Jan was afraid we’d run out of time and not get to visit The Lodge on the Drummond Ranch, which closed at 4pm. So I guess that’s for next time.

When we decided to come to Bartlesville, it was just a place to park the RV while we did the Pioneer Woman thing, not realizing how much stuff was in Bartlesville. So our next visit we’ll have to allow more time here.

The Drummond family lodge is not only used for parties, banquets, and overnight guests, it’s also where her TV shows are taped.

Following the directions on our pass, we turned off US60 at the ranch sign and

headed north out into the ranch. We passed a couple of oil production areas with a number of large storage tanks, and off in the distance we could see at least 30 large wind turbines.

The ranch has been in the Drummond family since the 1880’s, and at 433,000 acres, rates as the 17th largest private ranch in the U.S.

Along the way we also saw several large herds of the controversial wild mustangs that the BLM pays the Drummonds to house on their land.

Finally we arrived at the Lodge and found a place to park.

From the front entrance the place is not real impressive, but once you get inside you realize how large it really is.

It just keeps going back, and back.

With four large bedrooms,

multiple storage areas for dishes, pots and pans, and small appliances

it’s much bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside.

And then there’s the area where the TV shows are taped.

A really beautiful place.

Wrapping up our tour of the Lodge, we drove back into Pawhuska to once again have dinner at the Merc. We got in line at 4pm and were inside by 5:10, a longer wait than yesterday, but then we were an hour earlier.

This time we each got the Tomato Soup with Grilled Cheese Dippers, which as I  said yesterday, is a 3 Cheese Grilled Cheese sandwich on homemade bread, sliced into dipping sticks.

And of course we split an order of the Whiskey Glazed Carrots.

These things are addictive.

I mentioned in the title about Jan’s Trifecta. Well, the first two were to eat at the Merc, which we did, twice, and to visit the Lodge, which we did.

And then came the last leg of the Trifecta.

We were seated near the area of the open kitchen, and as we were finishing our meal, Jan looked up and said, “Ladd!”

And who should walk out of the kitchen but Ree’s husband, Ladd. When he heard his name called, he came over and talked to us for a couple of minutes and then posed for a photo. Now I think that due to the way Jan called out his name, Ladd thought we were someone he knew, or was supposed to know. But he was a good sport about it, anyway.

I want to commend Jan for not ‘babbling’ as she is wont to do in moments like this. Especially when the next thing Ladd said was, “Ree’s right behind me.”.

I’m actually surprised Jan didn’t just faint at that point, but she managed to keep her cool, even when Ree walked out of the kitchen and started talking to her.

Jan had questions about several of Ree’s recipes and Ree took the time to answer each one.

And then of course the obligatory photo.

As you can tell from the photo, at this point it’s all Jan can do to not giggle uncontrollably.

As it turned out, Ree  was there to have dinner with her family, Ladd, her brother Mike, and her father and stepmother. And they were sitting at a table right behind Jan.

I think it’s telling that rather than eat upstairs in their private dining room, they were right here in the middle of the place, just like us regular folks.

Deciding we had room for dessert, we split an order of the Tres Leches with Churros.

Once Jan figured her shaky knees would support her, we left about 6:45, noticing there was still a line waiting to get in.

What’s kind of ironic is that we almost didn’t eat at the Merc this evening, since Jan wasn’t sure she wanted to wait in line again. Now she’s really glad she did.

Tomorrow we’ve got a 200 mile run down to Pauls Valley, OK to visit for a couple of days with our son-in-law Lowell’s parents, Sonja and Lendel. Really looking forward to it.

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Thought for the Day:

Ree is just her nickname. Her real name is Ann Marie.