Category Archives: Past and Present

Reflections on how our past and present intertwine

07.25.23
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ANOTHER Unusual Day

I often feel I’m standing at the edge of the Universe, yelling into a tiny megaphone. My words fly out . . . no echo answers back, and it makes me wonder.

But sometimes, there is a response. 

In January 2020 I posted a piece under the heading “A Most Unusual Day.” 

(The post had no relation to the Jimmy McHigh-Harold Adamson song introduced by Jane Powell in the 1948 film A Date With Judy and later swung in a hip version by June Christy and the Stan Kenton Orchestra. I merely stole the song’s title to characterize a particular day in the life of my uncle, Edward F. Sommers, a pilot for Pan American Airways.)

On December 7, 1941, Uncle Ed was enroute to Honolulu from San Francisco, flying as first officer on Pan Am’s Anzac Clipper. That Sunday morning, radio signals made it clear Pearl Harbor was under attack. Captain Harry Lanier Turner changed course and landed at Hilo, two hundred miles away.

The Anzac Clipper. Photo from https://pan-american-clippers.fandom.com, licensed under CC-BY-SA.

My rambling January 2020 post told about Uncle Ed’s experience that day and in the days following. I also mentioned the near-simultaneous attacks on several Pan Am stations in the western Pacific.

The post drew several Facebook comments and one on-page comment at the time of its posting. Then three and a half years passed.

Mac’s Comment

Suddenly, three weeks ago, a long comment was posted on the page by Mac McMorrow, a lifelong resident of Hawaii’s Big Island. In the late 1930s, dengue fever and bubonic plague were common in the Hawaiian islands. As a result, McMorrow’s father, the first graduate of MIT’s public health engineer program, was hired to suppress the disease-prone rat population near Hilo. 

Though Mac McMorrow was a two-year-old toddler in 1941, Honoluolu Star-Advertiser columnist Bob Sigall reached out to him recently to comment on a note from one Alvin Yee. Yee had written:

The young Shah of Iran and his first wife, Queen Fawzieh, sometime between 1939 and 1945. Photo by Cecil Beaton. Public Domain.

“On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941 an unscheduled Pan Am Clipper flying boat [the Anzac Clipper my Uncle Ed copiloted] landed in Hilo Bay after eluding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and [Mac McMorrow’s] father tried to go on board and inspect everyone for disease but some haughty State Department official wouldn’t allow it saying the passengers were VIPs. 

“I happen to know the passengers included the young Shah of Iran and the Premier of Burma and their travelling parties on their way back to Asia. . . . Check with Mac to see if I got this story straight.” 

McMorrow, in his reply to Sigall, stated: “I can’t confirm very much of his story based on what was passed down to me by my father. I doubt it was my father who was confronted by the State Department official. I think my father would have mentioned that kind of incident to me. My father was the senior Territorial Health Officer on Hawaii Island and he would have had the plane quarantined if the regulations were not followed.”

He then adds a tantalizing tale:

Eurasian mystery woman? Photo by Chang Liu on Unsplash.

[W]hat I remember my father telling me was that a passenger on the plane was a US diplomat. He had to return to the mainland on the Clipper. However, accompanying him was an attractive Asian/Eurasian woman who was not an American citizen. She was not allowed to return on the flight. She was left in Hilo when the Clipper took off the next day. One of our handsome family friends quickly took her under his “protection”. He escorted her around Hilo for several days until she could get to Honolulu. You can imagine the gossip little Hilo would have enjoyed, even under martial law. 

Gracious Reader, this is the first whisper of this attractive Asian/Eurasian woman to reach Your New Favorite Writer’s ears. Or eyes, actually. It’s downright titillating.

Idle Speculations

One can easily imagine a diplomat traveling sub rosa with an attractive woman to whom he was not officially attached—even in the innocent 1940s. In fact, if we were enjoying a novel or a screenplay, you could count on it. A living informant telling us he heard it as fact from his father certainly adds credibility.

Cutaway view of Boeing 314 Clipper by Kenneth W. Thompson. Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

As to Alvin Yee’s assertion that “the young Shah of Iran [Mohammed Reza Pahlavi] and the Premier of Burma” were passengers on the plane: That’s not far-fetched, since the Boeing 314 Clippers were the ultimate form of transportation at the time, a natural choice for the rich, famous, and powerful. But the only other place I have seen this specific claim was in a 2016 article by Korea Times writer Nam Sang-so. I have emailed Mr. Nam a couple of times to find out where he got his assertion, but thus far have received no response. 

This leaves me wondering whether Alvin Yee’s information came from Nam Sang-so’s article or from some other source. 

Uncle Ed’s daughter Elaine greets him with a kiss on his return. Clipped from the San Francisco Chronicle of December 10, 1941, and scanned.

Robert Daley, in An American Saga: Juan Trippe and his Pan Am Empire, says, “The Clipper [was to] be refueled here at Hilo and flown back to San Francisco as soon as possible. Passengers were welcome to ride back [or else] they could stay here and make their own way to Honolulu or Mauir or wherever they were going.” He says all the passengers opted to stay in Hawaii but makes no claim that any of them were VIPs. He mentions no Iranian royalty, Burmese politicians, or mystery women. But a lack of evidence that they existed is not necessarily evidence they did not exist, if you see what I mean.

So for now these things must remain intriguing mysteries.

Thanks, Mac

But I do thank Mac McMorrow, now evidently a very active 84-year-old, for adding to the mystery. 

Even more, I thank him for honoring one of my posts by responding. You, too, Fair Reader, are welcome to add your comments to this or any other post on my “Reflections” blog. Or you may email me with comments. My address is larryfsommers@gmail.com.

Safe and happy travels to you all—whether by flying boat, magic carpet, or pickup truck.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

07.18.23
by

Interacting With Entities

Canada goose. Photo by Michael Gil, licensed under CC-BY-2.0.

I wrote a story called “Encounters With Monsters.” It was about interactions with human beings, from the viewpoint of a migratory Canada goose. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure that a goose on a golf course could see people as monsters.

The literary magazines have not yet beaten down my door for the opportunity to print this story. Since many people will never see a story told by an animal as adult fare, I think I’ll change my pitch and sell it as the text of a picture book for young readers.

Meanwhile, I’ve started thinking I should write another one—definitely for adults—called “Encounters With Entities.”

Here is one such encounter:

Interpol on Speed Dial

A few years ago we went to Italy with our friends Bill and Marsha. We rented a car in Florence. My name was on the contract, but Bill did most of the driving, because—well, Bill likes to drive . . . even in Italy!

Florence, a driver’s paradise. Photo by Infrogmation, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.

After a splendid week driving around Tuscany, we needed to return the car to the downtown agency where we had rented it. Florence, like many medieval towns in Italy, is old and confusing. It is a Rubik’s cube of one-way streets. If you rent a car in the center of town and manage to escape to the countryside, that does not guarantee you will ever solve the puzzle of getting back to the same place. The streets are all different, like the staircases at Hogwarts.

Bill turned into a street by a large hotel. It seemed to lead the right way but turned out to be a dead end. Bystanders waved at us sternly to turn around, which we did. As we exited that cul-de-sac, I spotted a sign in English: “PRIVATE ENTRANCE. HOTEL WATSAMATTAYOU GUESTS ONLY.” 

Somehow, we reached the darkest heart of Florence, returned the car, and went on our way.

FIVE MONTHS LATER comes a letter from the European Union. Inside the officious-looking envelope there’s a traffic ticket in the amount of €93.50, for “driving in unauthorised zone.” Ransacking my brain, I remembered the dead-end street beside the hotel. We had committed not just a faux pas but an actual Eurocrime.  

They must have had a camera snapping the plate of every car in that street. They must have had a computer programmed to match each plate with those of legitimate hotel guests. Their program must have had a subroutine that traced the plate to the rental agency and found my name and home address in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. 

And here’s the kicker: When the jury of computers had weighed the evidence and found me guilty, my punishment was too important to come from Florence city hall or the local polizi or even carabinieri headquarters. 

No. The computer forwarded our case to Geneva so some obscure office of the European Union, in all its majesty, could issue my ticket. 

In those days the euro was worth a third more than the dollar. In the five months (did I mention FIVE MONTHS??) since we did the crime, the exchange rate had tanked further. So that €93.50 came to well over a hundred clams. 

We shared the joy with Bill and Marsha, our unindicted co-conspirators. We were all tempted to shred the ticket and forget it. After all, the long arms of Jean-Claude von Shakedown couldn’t reach us on U.S. territory. 

BUT . . . we might want to visit Europe in the future. Imagine being turned back at Amsterdam passport control because the One Great Eurocomputer choked on an unpaid trafic violation. 

As William Shakespeare said, though in a slightly different context, “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

Bill and Marsha chipped in their half, we sent the required Euros to Geneva, and as a result we are still welcome in Europe. 

Valued customers, no doubt.

Dear and Gracious Reader, if it can happen to us, it can happen to you. Maybe it already has. 

Alternative History

Now picture, if you will, the same incident happening twenty years earlier—before Italy joined Europe and before computers gobbled up all continents.

Italian cop in Florence. Photo by Xeph, licensed under CC-BY-3.0.

Way back then, that same street might have already been blocked off to “unauthorised” traffic— for big hotels have ways to make their voices heard in heavily-touristed cities. But in those halcyon days, enforcement might have been on the honor system; or, more likely, it might have been entrusted to a red-faced little man in a comic opera uniform. He would have lunged into our misguided path, waving a white-gloved hand and blowing his whistle. 

He would have approached the driver’s side and addressed us in rapid Florentine. Bill and I would have shrugged, held up our hands, and chanted “No parlo italiano!” The little man in cape and shako would have then repeated the same phrases at twice the volume. We would have shrugged, gestured, and chanted operatically. He would have made obscene hand signs, which we would not have understood because they were in Italian.

We would have ended the episode by driving away unscotched. 

Case closed.

Just possibly, we might have been roused in our hotel at two a.m. by a carabinieri rifle squad. But even then (here comes my point, Reader, in case you have lost track) even then, there would have been a person—a brigadiere perhaps, or a maresciallo—whom we could have addressed. One might have pleaded or even begged. Maybe one could have paid a sort of fine on the spot—perhaps a thousand lire for each member of the squad. But there’s no way a few thousand lire would have added up to more than a sawbuck. 

Carabinieri keeping the peace. Photo by Dickelbers, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

The expense incurred twenty years later, doing things à la européenne, came from the cost of all those computers and all that bureaucracy. If you think Italian bureaucrats are bad, multiply them by every signatory to the Schengen accords. Translations alone must cost a fortune.

But when a total robot citation arrives from a major world government, five months after the foul deed, without the shred of a claim that any human ever witnessed the crime, or cared—what are you gonna do?

You can’t fight city hall if there’s no city hall to fight.

And that’s only one example.

It’s Everywhere! It’s Everywhere!

Thesis: Life is now more a matter of interfacing with entities, and less a matter of dealing with people.

Big Joe Williams sings the blues, 1971. Photo by Patrick Denoréaz, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Sometimes I wish I were a musician. If I were a musician, I could write and perform something like this:

Mmm . . . I got those old Interacting-with-Entities Blues,
Oh, yeah, I just got to tell you this news—
There’s no reason not to tell you,
I got those Interacting-with-Entities Blues, oh, yeah . . .

You’ll have to imagine the tune on your own, Fair Reader. I can’t be expected to do everything.

More on this subject another day.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

07.11.23
by

Mister Catbird

Wisconsin, where I live, is known for inclement weather. Winter seems to last about six months here in Madison. 

Then there is a brief spring, followed by three months of warm, GLORIOUS SUMMER, which tapers off in a wine-and-gold two-month autumn until snowflakes fly around November 1. 

Since summer does not last forever, I spend as much time as possible in my backyard. When not mowing or weeding, I sit in a chair, reading a book and sipping something. I glance up now and then to appreciate how lovely it all is. 

One view of my backyard.

A black locust towers over our house. The tree is in the front yard, but I can see its top, over the roof, from the backyard. It’s thing of beauty and a joy forever, especially with its green leaves yellowed by the afternoon sun.

Another view of my backyard.

There is a sound track, too. My favorite part is the catbird’s call. 

Gray catbird. Photo by Hari Krishnan, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This small gray bird, Dumetella carolinensis, flits about the backyard, perching in one of our tall spruces, or sometimes briefly in our forsythia, a red cedar, or my wife’s special Montmorency cherry tree. 

“But tell me, O New Favorite Writer, how do you know your catbird’s a he? Couldn’t it be a she?” 

No, Dear Reader. He could not. Which is something I did not know until I did a bit of research. It’s surprising what you can learn by writing a blog. More on catbird vocal dimorphism below.

For now, suffice it to say that Mister Catbird is a phenomenal singer and mimic, much like his Southern cousin Br’er Mockingbird. 

And he does all his vocalizing from a kind of throne. Though our common robins, sparrows, and cardinals use the same trees and bushes, when Mister Catbird perches there, it becomes a special thing.

The Catbird Seat

It’s known as “the catbird seat.” 

The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms says, “To be in the catbird seat means ‘to be sitting pretty, to be in a favorable position.’” The book, like other sources, calls it a 19th-century Southern Americanism but admits in a roundabout way that nobody ever heard of it until 1942, when James Thurber publicized Red Barber’s use of it.

James Thurber in 1960. Photo by Ed Ford, World Telegram staff photographer. Public Domain.

James Thurber (1894-1961) was a cartoonist, writer, humorist, journalist and playwright—a literary icon whose work appeared often in the New Yorker. Today he is mostly remembered for his short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” but during his lifetime he published many stories, as well as humorous essays, memoirs, and cartoons. One of his stories is called “The Catbird Seat.”

I won’t give you any spoilers, in case you’d like to read this now somewhat dated, but still entertaining, story. What concerns us here is how it got its title. Its main character, a file clerk named Mr. Martin, is disturbed by a co-worker, Mrs. Bellows, who sprinkles her office repartee with a variety of odd expressions. 

It was Joey Hart, one of Mr. Martin’s two assistants, who had explained what the gibberish meant. “She must be a Dodger fan,” he had said. “Red Barber announces the Dodger games over the radio and he uses those expressions–picked ’em up down South.” Joey had gone on to explain one or two. “Tearing up the pea patch” meant going on a rampage; “sitting in the catbird seat” means sitting pretty, like a batter with three balls and no strikes on him. 

Red Barber in 1955. Photo by Al Ravenna, World-Telegram staff photographer. Public Domain.

Red Barber (1908-1992), “the Old Redhead,” was a sports announcer who over a long career called major league baseball games for the Cincinnati Reds, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the New York Yankees. A native of Columbus, Mississippi, he spoke slowly, with a soothing southern drawl, countrified and unflappable even when describing the hottest action. 

Did Barber ever use the phrase “in the catbird seat” before reading Thurber’s 1942 story attributing it to him? That must remain one of those enigmas lost in the mists of time. 

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the catbird seat as “a superior or advantageous position.” I guess that’s about right. “He’s sitting in the catbird seat” means he’s got no worries—however things turn out, he’s covered. 

If you’re in the catbird seat you can sit aloof and entertain yourself with pretty songs while you wait for others to find out the bad news.

Our friend Mister Catbird perches, sometimes hidden by dense foliage, but always in a place where he can supervise the whole world. And he comments.

The Catbird’s Song

He sings one of the most complex songs of any bird. It’s a long, polysyllabic thing, a startling series of whistles, squeaks, squawks, and burbles. It lasts several seconds and is then repeated, only with its elements re-arranged. 

That’s how I know it’s a he, Dear Reader. Because the catbird I’m hearing is not singing a normal “catbird” song, which is relatively brief and simple. Nor is he chirping the single meow-like syllable that gives him his name.

The complexity of Mister Catbird’s call comes from the fact that he’s imitating a series of other birds’ calls. Ornithologists think this is simply a way for a male catbird to show off, attracting the female of the species to his rich repertory of bird sounds. It’s like a guy who gets up at a party and rattles off a series of impressions—John Wayne, Dean Martin, Jimmy Cagney (“You dirty rat!”), Cary Grant (“Judy Judy! Judy!”) and on and on. 

Only Dumetella carolinensis is actually a talented mimic, unlike our friend at the party. 

Do yourself a favor, Dear Reader, and take five minutes to watch and listen to this YouTube video sponsored by Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in which Greg Budney, former audio curator of the Macauley Library, shows examples of catbird mimicry.

After hearing all the calls the catbird masters in Budney’s video, you may imagine what it sounds like when they’re all run together by Mister Catbird in my backyard.

It makes me think of a general issuing detailed orders to the troops. 

It sounds like an NFL quarterback barking a complex cadence before the ball is snapped—half of the syllables to inform his teammates about the play, the other half only to fool the opponents.

It’s the auditory equivalent of the gestures a third-base coach uncorks between pitches. You’ve seen it if you’ve ever been to a ballgame. He pats his left shoulder, rubs his elbow, taps his foot, shakes his head, doffs his cap, etc.—so his teammates will know what to do but the other guys won’t figure it out.

Even though I know Mister Catbird’s song is just an act to impress Miz Catbird, I still can’t shake the feeling that his baffling cascade of sounds must mean something. 

He is, after all, in the catbird seat.

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Gray catbird. Photo by Rhododendrites. Licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0

One could do worse than be a catbird.

But if it’s not in your power to be a catbird, the next best thing would be to recognize when you happen to find yourself in the catbird seat. 

Enjoy it while it lasts.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

07.04.23
by

Independence

“In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776 . . .”

That was 247 years ago. 

Today is the 248th Fourth-of-July in the era of the United States of America. 

Legal Gavel by Blogtrepreneur. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

These days, gentlemen and ladies are apt to rush into battle over the Constitution, which became law thirteen years after Independence was declared. One of our three branches of government is largely absorbed by the task of discerning whether acts of government are within the Constitution or outside it. Then, once the Justices have their say, ladies and gentlemen rush to dispute the result, campaigning for either a change of heart or a change of Justices. 

So, yes, the Constitution is important.

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Yet in our darkest hour, our president, one of the great legal minds of his or any age, resorted not to the Constitution but to the Declaration of Independence, the more ancient document.

A Portrait of Mr. Lincoln at His Memorial by SavidgeMichael. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Abraham Lincoln reasoned that the Declaration preceded the Constitution. The Declaration in a sense fathered the Constitution and was superior to it—or at least more basic, more fundamental. The Constitution, he said, could not become a suicide pact for the nation; its strictest construction would not suffice for dissolving the Union. 

The Constitution of 1789 codified the structure of government in a state that existed for larger purposes, announced in 1776. Before there was a Constitution, the Declaration of Independence already said “all men are created equal.” The Constitution—in which the framers parsed fractional numbers to satisfy fragmented constituencies—could not abrogate that original guarantee.

The Declaration’s 56 signers explosively asserted that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” and that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . .”

This doctrine was the necessary foundation of revolutionary acts. Inconveniently, it happened that some who signed this guarantee of freedom owned slaves, whom they had no intention of letting go.

Slaveholders and non-slaveholders endorse freedom in Philadelphia, 1776. Painting by John Trumbull  (1756–1843). Public Domain.

Thus the stage was set for the Civil War 85 years later. In the midst of that orgy of blood, the Chief Executive chose to force the republic back upon its first principles. 

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In the days when children were thought capable of learning things “by heart,” we memorized Jefferson’s stirring preamble to the Declaration easily. It came ringingly off the tongue, while the stilted phrases of the Constitution’s preamble got lost in a chorus of mumbling. To promote the general welfare is fine and dandy—but Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness are the heart of our national mission.

Therefore, starting in 1777, we have always celebrated July Fourth as Independence Day.

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Seventy years ago, the young men of our family—my uncles—in the small town of Knoxville, Illinois, used to go to Gil Hebard’s gun store and buy fireworks. Not only pinwheels, fountains, and sparklers, but also skyrockets and miniature buzz bombs were legal then in the Flatlands. 

“Epic Fireworks Stars in the Sky Firework Rocket Effects for 4th of July – Epic Fireworks” by EpicFireworks is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Enveloped in the sultry evening, my uncles Dick and Garrett LaFollette, Earl Chaney, and Richard Henderson fired their sky-sizzlers with great gusto, arching them above a huge elm tree that overspread Grandma’s yard. After the main event, we kids lit snakes and sparklers and shot up rolls of paper caps in our cowboy pistols. 

The Public Square across the street was littered with scraps of pastry left earlier in the day by piggish contenders who plunged their whole faces into the pie-eating contest under a hot sun. There had also been sack races, three-legged races, and giant slices of watermelon for everyone. 

A reasonable person might wonder, what had these hijinks to do with the deep principles of liberty that Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence? It’s hard to say, Dear Reader, but—something, surely. 

The hoopla was connected with our liberty. Otherwise, why did we get up to these robust exertions on July 4, but never in the more moderate weather of Constitution Day, September 17? 

Now, seven decades after the spectacles that enlivened my youth, we still make a big deal out of Independence Day. We still have picnics, speeches, fireworks, and tomfoolery. We poise our politicians over galvanized tanks and give everybody with a pitching arm the opportunity to dunk them in cold water. 

There is something republican, and also democratic, about that. 

There would not be much need to celebrate, had 56 brave souls not inked their signatures to a parchment 247 years ago and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the twin dreams of freedom and equality. 

Happy Fourth, and be careful with those sparklers. If you don’t watch out you’ll put somebody’s eye out.

“Sparklers” by visual.dichotomy is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

06.27.23
by

The Joy of Covid

Fooboo leapt into the window seat and set up a clamor. 

How much is that Fooboo in the window?

It was too early in the day for our neighbor dog to drag his master past our window, and Fooboo long ago became bored with the mailman’s daily sallies. 

I stood up from our dining table—which we use in the living room, as a breakfast/lunch/dinner nook.

I ambled to the window, and lo!, there stood Milo Bung, my old schoolmate. Milo was about to ring the bell at our side door—which we use instead of the front door. 

Milo’s melodious bing-bong triggered another spasm of barking, so I couldn’t hear any thoughts in my brain. I shooed the dog off the window seat and bade him be still. 

Then I cranked open the casement window. 

Which wore me out.

“Over here, Milo,” I croaked. 

He took his finger off the button and turned towards my casement window. 

“Oh, there you are!” He sidled over, scratching his elbows.

“Don’t come any closer,” I squeaked.

“Yeah, I heard you were under the weather,” Milo said.

Dread Disease

“Under the weather?” I said. “Under the weather? I have COVID!”

COVID-19. Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins, Center for Disease Control. Public Domain.

Milo rolled his eyes.

“I do. I have it. We both tested positive,” I wheezed. “So it’s more than just under the weather, old pal. We’re victims of a major global pandemic.”

“Yesterday’s news,” Milo said. He favored me with what I suppose he meant as a cheerful smile. “What you’ve got, at most, is a well-entrenched endemic.”

“Thanks for your support.”

“Well, you’ve got medicine, haven’t you?”

“Yes.” 

“And you’re getting better?”

“Thank God.” 

“And also, be sure to thank all those doctors and nurses, and the robber barons in Big Pharma, too,” said Milo, “working day and night on the taxpayer’s dime to develop vaccines. Had you not been immunized, you might have gotten sicker.”

My wife and I had just returned from a long trip. Somewhere along the Danube, we had been occupied by the virus that made our return home a miserable one. 

A Bullet Dodged

But Milo was right. It could have been worse.

I sighed. “When we were young, I never heard of such a thing as a global pandemic.” 

“Nor I,” said Milo, using his shirt tail to polish his bifocals. “Guess the first we heard the term was when Michael Crichton and Robin Cook started writing all those lurid medical thrillers. Death from Ebola and all them.”

Death from Ebola? It was not a title I recalled.

“Be that as it may. My point, Milo, is that once I learned a global pandemic was possible I assumed it would be cataclysmic—we’d all die.” 

“Well, amigo, a lot of us did die. Not you and me personally, of course, but a lot of—well, you know. People. Millions of people, all around the world.”

It was a sobering thought.

“So what are you going to do?” Milo asked.

“What do you mean, what am I going to do?”

“When you get out of quarantine?”

Post-Covid Challenges

“First thing, I’m going to the hardware store and buy a new set of hex keys.”

“An astounding act of celebration,” he declared.

“The bathroom faucet handle came loose, and I seem to be missing the Allen wrench the right size for that set screw. Must have lost it somewhere along the way.”

“How could you?”

I gave him a stony glare. “I’ve only had that set of wrenches for forty-five or fifty years.”

“Well, go ahead, then. Splurge.”

My hapless friend, a direct descendant of King Æthelred the Unready, stood pondering, head bowed. 

“And after I get the hex keys, I’ll say a little prayer for all those souls who caught covid before the world piled up four years of clinical experience.”

Milo Bung peered up at me through my window screen. “Guess we could all say that one.”

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

06.20.23
by

The Joy of Flying

British author Alex Comfort brought forth The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking, full of frank advice and racy illustrations, in 1972—fifty-one years ago.

Recent journeys have persuaded Your New Favorite Writer that a similar manual is desperately needed so that people may experience in full the joy of airline travel. 

All I have so far is a bit of text, shown below. But let me know if you can provide salacious drawings to illustrate my text. We might submit the package to Random Penguin, Inc., and make a fortune.

WARNING: SOME ADULT CONTENT MAY HAVE GOTTEN MIXED IN WITH OUR USUAL JUVENILE FARE. READ THE FOLLOWING AT YOUR OWN RISK.

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For eons it was held impossible that humans should fly. Then aviation was invented. People waxed giddy with the romance of flight. On came the age of barnstormers and wing-walkers. 

Lillian Boyer stands on the wing of a flying biplane. Public Domain.
A B-314, the California Clipper, at Pearl Harbor before World War II. National Air and Space Museum (NASM 85-14240), Smithsonian Institution.

That was followed by an age when the legendary rich could fly on a giant Zeppelin or a Boeing 314 flying boat—both options loaded with first-class amenities and oodles of personal space—merely by purchasing a ticket. 

However, flight has now become the forlorn lot of the masses. I say it is high time—nay, half past high time, Dear Reader!—for someone to write up aviation as art form and the dire expedients needed to cope with it.

Return to Upright Position

If you fly at all, you are certain to encounter the classic Sagging Airline Seat. You will be either (a) a victim of this equipment failure or (b) the embarrassed perpetrator of it. Airline seats were designed to be lowered to a semi-reclining position, ostensibly to help you relax in style and comfort. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO USE THIS FEATURE, Gentle Reader. It is a relic of primitive times, before modern technology enabled the airlines to avoid the humiliation of bankruptcy by stuffing 437 passengers into a 220-passenger space. 

A seat with a mind of its own. Photo by Paul Colins at thehigherflyer.com. Fair use.

In the brave new world of modern jet travel, lowering your airline seat has become an act of vandalism. You are thrusting your head and shoulders into the lap of some poor soul behind you, who already can’t figure out how to remove the wrapper of his chicken giardino entrée without smearing tomato sauce all over his hula shirt. Given these constraints, no decent human being would dream of pushing the seat-angle release button located in the armrest. The problem is: certain airline seats—at least half a dozen in each plane, apparently—have figured out how to recline all by themselves!

What to do if you are the victim of a Sagging Airline Seat? No option is truly satisfactory. You can announce loudly to the cabin at large that “some people have no consideration of others!” and hope the passenger ahead of you gets the hint. Or you can escalate the situation by shoving forward on the reclined seat back, hard enough to catapult your tormentor into his own tray-table. But regardless which course you choose, that seat will soon be sagging back into your space.

That’s bad enough, Dear Reader, but what if you are the unwilling perpetrator? With no intent at all to recline your seat, you find yourself slumping backwards, into the space of the person behind you. Your seat has chosen to lie down on the job. Perhaps you even receive a violent impetus from behind, driving you rapidly toward the first-class section; yet you know you will never make it that far. 

The best tactic is to press your seat-angle button, simultaneously grasping your own seat back with the other hand and yanking forward decisively—or if not decisively, at least resolutely. Then, when the seat sags again on its own initiative, usually within five minutes, you can lean around your seat, eyeballing the person behind you, and perform an elaborate shrug, implicitly absolving yourself of any further guilt. This will satisfy all but the most truculent fellow passengers, at least to the extent that you can both spend the entire rest of the flight mumbling and grumbling. 

These are the only known and approved methods to experience the joy of flying in the context of a chronically malfunctioning seat. 

What a Relief

Another true “joy of flying” maneuver is the well-known Gotta-Go-Potty Shuffle. This is best achieved some forty minutes into a domestic flight, or an hour and twenty minutes into an international flight. It works best if you are the window passenger in a three-seat row; but even if you are only the middle passenger, the discombobulation of at least one perfect stranger can be quite satisfying. 

Oh, joy! Here comes the beverage cart. Photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash.

Once you have forced your inboard seatmate or seatmates to stand up and move down the aisle to give you room, if you have timed your escape right, you can start heading toward the rear galley area just as two burly and surly cabin attendants commit irrevocably to wheeling a bulky, impassable beverage cart down the aisle. That’s all right. Go ahead, squeeze by.

Start by approaching the aisle one row forward of the cart’s progress, and place both of your feet into the space of the person sitting in the aisle seat. You may need to kick aside the strap of their under-the-seat backpack, but don’t let that bother you. Once you achieve this position you will be looming over that aisle passenger, clearly in their space, maybe even supporting yourself by placing your hands on their armrest. Extra points can be awarded if this passenger is trying to sleep and you are waking them up. 

Then, as the cabin attendants move the cart forward past the seat row you are usurping, shove yourself into the three-inch space on the near side of the cart. This will force the attendants to wrestle the cart sideways and widen the three-inch gap to six inches. Now, strike while the iron is hot. Blunder your way through that six-inch gap. Extra points may be obtained if you can manage this while being significantly overweight.

It is important to act with confidence. Do not show fear or self-doubt. The customer is always right, and as an airline passenger you have been abused enough by the airline and you’re not going to take it anymore! Plow on down the aisle. After all, when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Vive La Différence!

A lofty view from the apex of the Three-point Stance. Photo by Kristoferb, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

While we’re on the subject of toiletting, here’s another thing. Women may not know it, because they don’t usually pee standing up. Whereas men do so all the time, and with casual abandon. 

Thus all men who ride passenger planes are familiar with the Airline Lavatory Three-point Stance. That is: Two feet planted equidistant on either side of the toilet, body canted forward to suspend the, um, source of urination directly above the open bowl, and the crown of one’s head lodged against the inward-sloping bulkhead. This stance confers stability even in stratospheric turbulence, given sufficient neck strength. And it leaves both hands free for important actions like unzipping, rezipping, and, importantly, aiming. 

Come to think of it, there may be men who have not yet mastered this position. I beg of you, gentlemen: practice, for all our sakes. 

Anyway, I thought you women, who may have supposed the male role is all beer and skittles, would want to know about this continuing challenge to our manhood.

Final Results Pending

There are many other refinements, not yet mentioned, to the art of flying with joy. But before proceeding further with the project I will wait till I see the sample illustrations.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

06.06.23
by

Hamilton vs. Republicans

Alexander Hamilton. Portrait by John Trumbull, 1804. Public Domain.

Alexander Hamilton has got me thinking about Republicans.

Hamilton may have been a republican, but he was not a Republican. 

Hamilton was the disease Republicans vowed to cure.

I’ve been reading Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow’s scholarly biography. It’s the book that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to create the musical show Hamilton.

Out of respect for your time, Fair Reader—and to put my own subsequent remarks in context—I shall boil down Chernow’s quarter of a million words to a few paragraphs, immediately below.

Summary of Chernow’s Book 

Hamilton was a meteor that flashed across American skies in the late 1700s and very early 1800s. The glare of his arc obscured a lot of other guys desperately trying to get noticed. 

President George Washington in 1795. Portrait by Gilbert Stuart. Public Domain.

A poor immigrant from the West Indies, Hamilton became George Washington’s right-hand man during the Revolutionary War, and the postwar confusion, and the early Constitutional period. When Washington was elected president, he chose Hamilton as secretary of the treasury. Besides consolidating and funding the existing Revolutionary War debts, starting a national bank, and putting America’s currency and credit on a sound basis, Hamilton organized nearly everything else about the infant government. He pushed all his many projects, from the Coast Guard to the Whiskey Tax, on to ultimate success.

In his pushiness, he made an enemy of Thomas Jefferson, Washington’s Secretary of State. Besides the fact that Hamilton leaned toward the British, from whom we had just separated, while Jefferson favored revolutionary France, the two men held opposing images of the future United States. 

Hamilton advocated a strong central government to protect U.S. commercial interests, foster trade, and preside over an expanding industrial economy. He also abhorred slavery and wished to see it abolished. Jefferson idealized the independent farmer spread across the landscape—including those independent farmeers of the South who owned battalions of slaves to help with their independent farming. He distrusted cities, financiers, and a centralized government.

The Founding Fathers abhorred political parties; but factions immediately arose in the new American republic, based on contrasting worldviews and economic interests—and you had to call them something. Hamilton and his teammates were called Federalists. The name came from the Federalist Papers, a series of essays Hamilton had written, or caused to be written, promoting adoption of the U. S. Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson as president, 1801. Portrait by Rembrandt Peale. Public Domain.

Jefferson and his friends, including fellow Virginians James Madison and James Monroe, accused Hamilton of trying to sell America back to the British. They suggested that Federalists wanted to replace our elected president with a monarchy—despite the fact that Federalist-in-chief George Washington would never condone such a thing. The Jefferson crowd were called anti-Federalists, or more lastingly, Republicans—simply meaning they favored a republic, not the monarchy they feared the Federalists would impose.

Federalists vs. Republicans: It was the birth of the American two-party system. Things went downhill from there.

Chernow of course adds numerous details, which I have spared you. But that is the gist of it.

The Upshot

Hamilton came to a tragic end, which need not detain us here. 

But what of that two-party system? What happened to it? Why is it that, 225 years later, we do not still have Federalists and Republicans? 

Hold on a moment, Gracious Reader: Are you sure we don’t?

Around 1800, when France’s woes were an American spectator sport, U.S. fans of the French Revolution organized themselves as “Democratic Clubs.” These clubs aligned with Jefferson’s Republicans, at least on foreign policy. So the Republicans started calling themselves Democratic Republicans and, later on, just Democrats. 

Meanwhile the Federalist party shot itself in the political foot too many times and went out of business, to be replaced by a party called the Whigs. Named after a similar party in the United Kingdom, the Whigs were not quite Federalists, but they had a lot in common with them. They wanted a strong central government that would foster infrastructure—roads, canals, railroads—to grow the domestic economy. They also favored a national bank and protective tariffs. 

Sound a lot like Hamilton, don’t they, these Whigs?

The Democrats—and remember, Democrats were Republicans—espoused Jeffersonian ideals. They aimed to protect farmers, including the slaveholding farmers of the South. They rejected urbanism, industry, and finance. They opposed a strong central government. 

Senator Stephen A. Douglas. Original photo by Julian Vannerson, with Photoshop work by Kosobay. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, for example, wanted each state to make its own choice on slavery. This idea, which he called Popular Sovereignty, would have allowed Northern states to salve their consciences by prohibiting the immoral institution while simultaneously the Southern states could go on exploiting African American slaves. Douglas thought it was the ideal solution.

As the slavery question came to dominate politics, the Whig party—which was not all of one mind on slavery—withered away. A new party was born to take its place. Founding delegates meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin, thought “Republican” would be a good name. The Democrats having discarded the label long before, it was up for grabs. So old Whigs like Willam H. Seward and Abraham Lincoln became Republicans. 

By 1860, the two-party system comprised Republicans, who now occupied the niche the Federalists had carved in the 1790s; and Democrats, who formerly had called themselves Republicans, back when they stood against the Federalists.

All clear so far? 

Maybe not? Perhaps a review is in order. 

Hamilton led the Federalists, who wanted a strong government fostering industry, trade, and commerce. Jefferson led the Republicans, who wanted a weak central government, states’ rights, and a system tilted in favor of dispersed farmers.

Through a process of evolution, the party that carried on Hamilton’s outlook called itself “Republican” in the mid-nineteenth century, as the Jeffersonian Republicans decades earlier had changed their label to “Democrats.”

Switch-a-Roonie

When the Civil War came along, it was a war between the Republicans and the Democrats. That’s an oversimplification, but conceptually it is true.

The Republicans won the Civil War and the Democrats lost the Civil War.

Then the Republicans, assuming the slavery question had been settled, went on to other preoccupations: high finance and large-scale industry—typical Hamiltonian concerns.

The Democrats, after losing the Civil War, hoped to restore their party’s good name in the North while restoring society to its antebellum status in the South. 

Now, Kind Reader, it is beyond Your New Favorite Writer’s competence to sketch how the two-party system evolved from a quasi-Hamiltonian versus a quasi-Jeffersonian party a century ago to a Big Government party and a Small Government Party today.

I am only here to suggest that today’s Democrats seem to espouse postures of which Hamilton, the Federalist, might approve. And today’s Republicans seem to espouse postures that Jefferson, the Republican, might endorse.

Would it be folly to suggest that today’s Democrats are a continuation of Hamilton’s Federalists, and that today’s Republicans now carry on the tradition of Jefferson’s Republicans? 

Perhaps it is folly. Yet there is something in it.

So What?

Reading Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, I especially enjoyed one statement by the author: “If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.”

Hamilton set the pattern of the federal government as an active partner in setting the United States up to be a great nation—commercially, politically, and on the world stage. Because of Hamilton we have a federal government that is not afraid to step into the lives of its citizens and assume a directive role.

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others were wary of such confident assertiveness by the Executive Branch. They strove to establish primacy of the Congress over the Executive. With almost 250 years of perspective, we can say they largely failed in that mission. Congress today is more an appendage of the presidency than the other way around.

Largely for this reason, today’s Republicans wage a twilight struggle against federal overreach, highlighting many cases where people’s lives have suffered unreasonable intrusion by the federal government. They are opposing a well-entrenched foe—the Democrats, moved by a vision of the good things government has accomplished, and all the good things it might yet accomplish, if only the Republicans would let it.

The chief lesson of our common past is that the passions of today did not spring full-blown from our own brilliant imaginations. They are the echoes of similar passions begun centuries ago and modulated along the rocky pathways of the intervening years. 

Lord help us all if we fail to grasp the implications of this fact.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

05.30.23
by

Willows

Memory is a funny thing. It is not, strictly, accountable.

Memory is evocative. It calls up emotions. When gripped by clear and distinct memories, we may easily grasp the emotions they inspire. We may re-live the feelings we felt at the time.

Nostalgia (1895). Ladislav Mednyánszky (Hungarian, 1852 – 1919). Public Domain.

But when we revisit early childhood—fragmentary scenes, half remembered and half dreamed—we may feel vague longings which have no substance but a mysterious and compelling flavor.

Reeling In the Years

Last week, on May 20, my mother would have been 101 years old. She only made it to 74, so she’s lived only inside me these past 27 years. My memories of Mom are mostly concrete and specific. Thinking of her, I re-live my feelings from the midst of life with her.

Some other Woodrow Wilson. Photo by Harris and Ewing. Public Domain.

But now I’m thinking of Georgia McCune, Mom’s best friend from high school. Georgia married a man named Woody Wilson, a few years older. His parents, the Wilsons, had chosen to name him Woodrow. So that gives you an idea when he was born.

Mom lived in Knoxville, a village of two thousand souls in West-central Illinois. Georgia was from East Galesburg. East Galesburg is more like a suburb of Knoxville than of Galesburg—except that East Galesburg couldn’t possibly be a suburb or any kind of “urb.” Even now, it barely forms a hamlet. In those days it was but a few houses along a gravel road. 

I do remember the house Georgia McCune’s parents lived in—because we visited there often. But the memory is blurry. I must have been three or four years old.

Theirs was the last or nearly the last house. The road sloped down to a cattail-fringed lake. The lake is no longer there; I checked on Google Earth. But it was an ill-omened lake anyhow, Georgia’s older brother having died there. He dived in headfirst, struck a submerged rock or a shallow bottom, broke his neck, and drowned. This was told to me as an object lesson. 

To this day, in all things, I look before I leap. 

I do recall walking down to the lake once with Mr. McCune, Georgia’s father. He took out his pocket knife and carved me a whistle from a willow branch. He cut a notch and slid the bark off the willow. I have forgotten exactly how it was done, but it turns out you can find anything on YouTube. 

Magical Nights

I must have been five or six when Mr. McCune made me that whistle, else I would not remember it so clearly.

But I remember more vaguely once, or perhaps more than once, when I was younger, attending a picnic at the McCunes’. They had a large patio, probably paved with brick or stone, beside their house. There were wood tables and a large brick barbecue. The whole side yard was canopied o’er with two or three giant weeping willows, their branches trimmed just enough to cast a splendid aura over the whole scene. 

A weepy willow. Photo by Larry F. Sommers.

It turned dark as we ate. But the darkness and the end of supper did not extinguish the evening. Somebody—one of the picnickers, or perhaps a neighbor—had a small pack of hounds. They treed a coon down near the lake. I recall watching and hearing the hounds baying at the treed coon. I do not recall any guns, shooting, or a dead raccoon. Maybe it was not a real hunt, just an exhibition of the dogs.

Later that night, or maybe on another, similar night, Mister McCune took a few of us—men and boys—down the railroad line to see something or other on the tracks. He may have been a Santa Fe Railroad employee—a switchman or yard hand. I recall he lit a red signal lantern and escorted us from the gravel road to the tracks, where we looked at some train cars. Why we did so remains a mystery.

The cars may have been parked on a siding for the brickyard. East Galesburg’s only industry was Purington Bricks. Purington Pavers were famous throughout the Midwest and beyond for their deep purple color and their adamant composition. Some streets in small towns are paved with Purington bricks to this day, long after the brickyard has fallen silent. 

Purington Bricks 1895. Galesburg Republican Register. Public Domain.

The silent brickyard has been overrun with woods. If you know just where to look, you may see a ruined smokestack poking above the trees. That’s about it.

Meaning

What does this all mean? 

That’s just it, Dear Reader. I don’t know. 

Perhaps if I did, it would not call me back so. Its meaning would be too plain for further query. 

But as things stand, this reverie of summer evenings in East Galesburg is just a near-fantasy—a wisp of truth at its heart, and a swirl of nostalgia surrounding it. 

I don’t even know why I thought you might like to hear about it.

Perhaps there is something like this lodged stubbornly in your own memory, Gentle Reader. Some fragment of a long-lost world. Something you don’t understand now because you had not reached an age of understanding then. 

Take my advice. Don’t interrogate it too hard. It won’t stand up under questioning. 

Just bathe in it for a time.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

05.23.23
by

All the Time There Is

On a nice day in May, as I lay in my zero gravity chair in the backyard, looking up, examining cloud patterns etched in a blue dome, its bottoms fringed round with the yellow-green of spring trees—it occurred to me that however much time this reverie took, I could spare.

Growing older, I become more patient. With each passing year—each step closer to the chasm that ends this life and drops us into the next—I am less concerned about running out of time.

When young I was often impatient.  

Now, my impatience is all used up.

In the midst of the storm and strife, the middle years of life, there are things to accomplish that seem time-bound. We must prove ourselves in some minor skill before we can move up the ladder. We must pile up enough gold to send our kids to college by the time they are ready to go. We need to stretch and to strive, to scrimp and to save, to squirrel away assets against the future.

All that is behind me. Now, everything worth doing seems to want all my attention. It is less vital to finish than to engage. 

Kipling sketched a remarkable image of the afterlife—only I suppose it applies to my here and now:

When Earth's last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and faith, we shall need it—lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew.
And those that were good shall be happy: they shall sit in a golden chair;
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comet’s hair.
They shall find real saints to draw from—Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;
They shall work for an age at a sitting and never be tired at all!
And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame;
And no one will work for the money, and no one will work for the fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They are!

We who have lived beyond the hustle and urgency of mid-life know a secret we could tell to those still trapped in that gosh-awful hurly-burly. But it’s no good; they would not listen. 

Or rather, they would not hear. Even gifted with the best intentions and the strongest focus, they could not hear. You don’t have ears for that secret until it becomes your own. 

It is the whisper of Eternity. It says: Go. Do. Enjoy. Be. You have all the time there is.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

05.16.23
by

Fonix

A news story stunned my ears last week, courtesy of Wisconsin Public Radio.

“A bipartisan bill is expected to be released this month that would change the way most public schools in Wisconsin teach reading,” reported Corinne Hess. 

“. . . Instead of being taught reading through pictures, word cues and memorization, children would be taught using a phonics-based method that focuses on learning to sound out letters and phrases.

“According to [the Department of Public Instruction], only about 20 percent of school districts are using a phonics-based approach to literacy education. Other reading curriculums that don’t include phonics have been shown to be less effective for students.”

Whoa. Stop the presses!

Bipartisan? Could peace be at hand in the Great Reading War?

Phonics

When I was a kid in 1951—yes, 72 years ago—our teachers taught us phonics. They leaked the remarkable secret that each letter represents one or more sounds in the spoken English language. (I mean American English, Dear Reader. I hold no brief for British, ANZAC, or South African speakers who utter tortured diphthongs where we would use vowels.)

We learned that “a” can be pronounced long, as in “bake”; short, as in “flag”; soft, as in “father”; and so forth. We learned that “c” is sometimes hard, as in “cat,” and sometimes soft, as in “recess.” Interestingly, “bicycle” has a soft c and a hard c, both in one word. “Y,” also interestingly, can sound like a long “i,” as in “tyke,” or as a long “e,” as in “candy,” or as a short “i,” as in “bicycle.” But sometimes it has a special motive force of its own, as in “Yankee.” 

We were taught that phonics rules had exceptions—quite a few of them, actually. For example, sometimes the sound normally represented by the letter f is actually spelled with the two letters “ph,” as in “telephone.” Sometimes the two-letter combination “ch” is pronounced like a hard c or a k, as in “chorus,” not with the soft “ch” sound of “chair.” And so forth, and so on. 

Oh, so many exceptions. Yet, even with all these exceptions, the whole thing hung together and made a kind of sense. 

Light bulb. Photo by MEHEDI HASAN ( KΛΛSH ) on Unsplash.

When you met an unfamiliar word you could “sound it out,” and nine times out of ten it turned out to be a word you already knew. You could produce a string of sounds from a word’s letters, and you would suddenly recognize the word. 

Hallelujah! A light bulb went on in your head. 

Sometimes you had to try three or four runs at it, using alternate pronunciations, but eventually you could figure it out. 

The opportunity to sound out the words you didn’t know made reading a joy. You could move forward at a decent speed. A great bonus was that when you figured out a word, all its snags and bumps stayed with you. So when you discovered that “diaphragm” spelled dy-uh-fram, not dy-uh-fraggum, you remembered that silent g ever afterward.

It was never a perfect system, but it worked pretty well for those of us who were thoroughly drilled in phonics in the first two or three grades of school.

So what could possibly go wrong? 

Politics, that’s what.

Poor Johnny

In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published a book called Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It. Flesch’s thesis was that a new method of reading instruction—the so-called “whole word” or “look-say” method—was robbing a generation of youngsters of the power of reading. Instead of learning to associate letters with sounds and thereby sound out the words they were reading, young people were expected to simply recognize words one by one, from their general shape. This made reading into an insurmountable guessing game, according to Flesch—akin to the challenge faced by young Chinese who need to learn thousands of separate characters.

Horace Mann. Public Domain.

The whole word method was not actually new—education guru Horace Mann embraced it in the 1840s—but it had gradually supplanted phonics instruction in American public schools in the first half of the twentieth century.

When Flesch launched his withering critique in 1955, it met stiff resistance from a liberal educational establishment that had largely adopted the whole word method and rejected phonics. This debate soon went the way of all debates in our fractured society: The politicians made it their own. Reading became just another battlefront in our great cultural war. If you were conservative you favored phonics; if you were liberal, you pooh-poohed phonics and favored the whole word approach (also called the whole language approach).

That frozen paradigm has persisted through six or seven decades. If you were for phonics, you might want to put the 19th-century McGuffey readers back in the classroom; you might also be suspicious of fluoride in the water supply and aspire to Make America Great Again. On the other hand, if you favored the whole language approach, you were probably a card-carrying member of the teachers’ union and wanted to put Critical Race Theory in the classrooms. 

A Freshening Wind

Now, there seems to be a shift in the wind. For the first time in my long memory, it seems both sides have tired of treating reading as a political football and are seeking to coalesce on “evidence-based” or “scientific” methods of reading instruction. And scientific evidence has accumulated in favor of phonics to the point where it cannot be ignored. 

Tony Evers. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

But here’s what’s really new: The Republican assemblyman drafting new legislation on the matter is working with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to draft a plan teachers can embrace. Liberal Democratic governor Tony Evers, himself a veteran educator, sounds willing to endorse a bipartisan phonics plan.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if educational practices, for once, were not held hostage to partisan ideologies? One would like to think it can happen.

A Personal View

I was taught phonics. My wife, also a product of the 1950s, learned to read by the whole word method. I am a good speller and know a lot about the way words are put together. My wife is not a confident speller and is deaf to many verbal nuances. 

On the other hand, there are probably people who became excellent spellers and wordsmiths without ever being exposed to phonics. And there are probably people who learned phonics but did not learn to read very well. No theory can fully capture the natural differences in people’s aptitudes and learning styles. 

As a traditionalist, I look askance at laws that would dictate teaching methods statewide. What ever happened to local school boards?, I wonder. Should not they, rather than the legislature or the DPI, control the curriculum and pedagogy in their own schools? 

In an era when powerful forces militate for broad uniformity of policy in all arenas, there is something to be said for the idea of local variation—or at least, for the possibility of local variation. It’s hard to imagine that Milwaukee and Black River Falls have the same set of problems and need identical solutions.

Even with that caveat, if current trends bring about a re-emphasis on phonics, that’s probably a good thing—especially if we can bury the hatchet on our longstanding war over how children learn to read.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer