An apocalyptic beginning of the End of Days? Make my solar eclipse a chance to sing again Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’ from 1972

Is today’s partial 38 per cent solar eclipse over Thompson, Manitoba, under clear blue skies and balmy 16°C temperatures (the normal April 8 daytime high is 4°C), a sign of a premillennial Rapture signalling the beginning of the End of Days, as today’s total eclipse crosses two towns in the United States named Nineveh in Ohio and Indiana, as well as Rapture, Indiana? The original Nineveh, the oldest and most-populous city of the ancient Assyrian empire, is situated on the east bank of the Tigris River and encircled by the modern city of Mosul, Iraq. Interestingly, today’s solar eclipse is not visible in Mosul.

Not being either a scholar of eschatology or astronomy, I probably wouldn’t even be contemplating such a question about the April 8 solar eclipse if it hadn’t been for my old Left Coast friend Ron Graham posting on Facebook today, “To those religious nutcases that believed the upcoming solar eclipse would be ‘the rapture’, be sure to check in with us on Tuesday. It quite possibly did happen for some, but appears that Jesus overlooked you and your friends for some reason.”

While it is true that Christian scripture records that Jesus preaching on the Mount of Olives, a mountain ridge in East Jerusalem, east of and adjacent to Jerusalem’s Old City – in what is called the Olivet Discourse, found in Matthew 24 – talks about the end times and says the sun will be darkened, belief in apocalyptic happenings portended by solar eclipses are not proprietary to Christianity. Throughout history, eclipses have been interpreted by many cultures and religions as a disruption of the natural order.  

Hindu beliefs involve demons swallowing the sun. In ancient China, the etchings discovered in Anyang depicted solar eclipses as celestial dragons attacking and devouring the sun. In South America, ancient Incans believed solar eclipses were a “sign of wrath and displeasure” from Inti, the “all-powerful sun god.” Choctaw Indians from the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States believe a mischievous black squirrel gnawing on the sun causes solar eclipses, and legend holds the squirrel must be frightened away by the clamor and yells of the event’s human witnesses. In West Africa, the Tammari people, also known as Batammariba from the northern regions of Togo and Benin, believe the celestial bodies intersecting during an eclipse represent human feuds on Earth.

Well I hear you went up to Saratoga
And your horse naturally won
Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun

I have always loved Carly Simon’s 1972 song “You’re So Vain.” In the early 1980s, many of us thought the song was about singer James Taylor, who was married to Carly Simon from 1972 to 1983. But in a 1983 interview with the Washington Post, Simon said, “”It certainly sounds like it was about Warren Beatty, He certainly thought it was about him – he called me and said ‘thanks for the song. ‘” Later, she said two other men, who so far remain unidentified, along with Beatty, also inspired elements of the song. So who knows?

As I said, I am neither a scholar of eschatology or astronomy, so perhaps it is not surprising my interest in solar eclipses is anchored elsewhere.

In the 1980s, I spent a too short part of many a summer at the Dell family’s summer home on the Atlantic Ocean in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where my mother-in-law, Carol Dell, a Vineyarder by both birth and disposition, would tell me stories of Carly Simon and James Taylor, who were also both in many ways Vineyarders themselves. Stories about Island events such as live performances at the Hot Tin Roof, opened in 1979 by Carly Simon, George Brush and Herb Putnam. Close your eyes, and you were transported back a few years in time and were there, so it seemed. Magical. The full lyrics to “You’re So Vain” go like this:

Son of a gun

You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht
Your hat strategically dipped below one eye
Your scarf it was apricot
You had one eye in the mirror, as you watched yourself gavotte
And all the girls dreamed that they’d be your partner
They’d be your partner and

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you

You’re so vain (you’re so vain)
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you, don’t you?

You had me several years ago when I was still quite naive
Well you said that we made such a pretty pair and that you would never leave
But you gave away the things you loved
And one of them was me
I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee and
You’re so vain

You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain, you’re so vain
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you don’t you, don’t you?

I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee and

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain (you’re so vain)
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you don’t you

Well I hear you went up to Saratoga
And your horse naturally won
Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun

Well you’re where you should be all the time
And when you’re not, you’re with some underworld spy
Or the wife of a close friend, wife of a close friend and

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain (so vain)
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you don’t you, don’t you, don’t you now

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain
Probably think this song about you
You’re so vain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGQ2DJ65-ok&t=6s

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Witnessing history from Boston: The 1980 Jimmy Carter presidential re-election campaign and the October Surprise that wasn’t to be

I never worked directly for Jimmy Carter. In fact, I have never met him, unlike my friend Art Milnes, a journalist from Kingston, Ontario, who would years later become a cherished personal friend of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. But I did spend the last 2½ months of the 1980 Jimmy Carter presidential re-election campaign working as a supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research, where I oversaw several hundred phone bank employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most of our work that autumn was on the Carter campaign and U.S. Senate races.

I was 23 years old and had just moved to West Somerville, Massachusetts and was looking for a job in September 1980. I happened to be walking down the west side of Massachusetts Avenue, near Central Square in Cambridge, on a sunny, but crisp, late summer Boston morning, when I saw a help wanted job ad for interviewers down in a hole-in the-wall basement commercial space below sidewalk level.

I spent my first two days working the phones, polling voters state-by-state. I was then promoted to supervise phone bank interviewers. I remember thinking there apparently really is something to the American Story of meritocracy. My only previous experience in public opinion research had been working a few months earlier in the spring of 1980 on a Quebec Referendum project for a Winnipeg company, Opinion Place/Marketing Insights, as a field interviewer in Peterborough, Ontario for the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

My Cambridge Survey Research boss, Mark Leavitt, took me out to my first Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park to celebrate my promotion. I still remember his pre-game advice: “Make sure there is a full aspirin bottle by the coffeemaker for employees.” Back then, sampling was done with actual physical telephone directories and coding was done largely by hand. One of the curiosities I quickly noticed was that our ASA-and-caffeine-driven phone bank interviewers, if they spent more than a a couple of days working a region, would fairly quickly wind up sounding like the respondents from whatever area code they were calling and interviewing people on their political preferences, especially in smaller and more ethnically homogenous areas of the country. Some kid from Jersey would wind up talking slower and softer, like he was from the lowcountry of  South Carolina, after a few days. By far the most difficult voters to reach were those who had telephone numbers in the hollers of Tennessee and Kentucky. You could call 100 numbers and 99 would be unreachable because of some technical glitch, or simply out of service.

While we knew we were in an uphill re-election battle against Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, I don’t think it was until the last days of the campaign, when we realized there would be no “October Surprise” with the release of the 52 United States diplomats and American citizens being held hostage by Iranian students in Tehran, that we also realized we were going to come up short on election day Nov. 4.

We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Red Line “T”. The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

After the Carter campaign, I went to work as research associate at Kenyon and Eckhardt (later Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon and Eckhardt) in Boston. I worked in the research department of the advertising agency’s Boston field office. Major commercial client accounts included airline and automotive companies.

As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

As for Jimmy Carter, well, he would go on to become the most consequential and respected former president in United States history. At 98, he is also the oldest-ever former president.

Millard Fuller founded Habitat for Humanity International in 1976. From humble beginnings in Alabama, he rose to become a self-made marketing millionaire at 29. But as the business prospered, his health, integrity and marriage suffered, he noted later. In 1965, Millard and his wife Linda turned away from their millionaire lifestyle and rededicated their lives to serving God.

Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, remain the best-known faces of Habitat for Humanity. Their involvement began in 1984 when the former president led a work group to New York City to help renovate a six-story building with 19 families in need of decent, affordable shelter.

A non-profit, ecumenical Christian housing ministry, Habitat for Humanity seeks to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness and to make decent shelter a matter of conscience and action.

Through volunteer labour and donations of money and materials, Habitat builds and rehabilitates simple, decent houses alongside the homeowner partner families. It is not a giveaway program. In addition to a down payment and monthly mortgage payments, homeowners invest hundreds of hours of their own labour or sweat equity into building their Habitat house and the houses of others. Habitat houses are sold to partner families at no profit and financed with affordable loans. The homeowners’ monthly mortgage payments are used to build still more Habitat houses.

Jimmy Carter is not only finishing well. He started well.

“For myself and for our Nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”

Those were the first words spoken by President Jimmy Carter in his inaugural address Jan. 20, 1977. As Art Milnes noted in 2016: “It is often forgotten but President Carter on a January day in 1977 set the gold standard for how a winner treats their opponent. I will let President Ford, who lost that year, tell the rest of the story via his memoirs.”

“Mr. Ford described what happened the day President Carter delivered his Inaugural Address. ‘The weather that morning,’ Ford wrote, ‘was windy and cold, but the atmosphere was full of hope and the crowd that gathered below the East Front of the Capitol reflected that. Chief Justice Burger administered the oath to the thirty-ninth President of the United States.

Carter’s first words were, ”For myself and for our nation I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgD179mgMow). That was so unexpected, such a gracious thing for him to say. The crowd began to applaud, and I bit my lip to mask my emotions. I didn’t know whether to remain seated or to stand. But when the cheers continued I decided to stand and reached over to clasp Carter’s hand.’”

Carter went onto say, “Here before me is the Bible used in the inauguration of our first President, in 1789, and I have just taken the oath of office on the Bible my mother gave me just a few years ago, opened to a timeless admonition from the ancient prophet Micah: “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”

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A New England Thanksgiving: Midday Detroit Lions NFL football and a Star Market turkey from Porter Square

Most of my Thanksgiving celebrations have been in Canada, but twice in the 1980s I found myself living in the United States for Thanksgiving on Thursdays. I was living in West Somerville, Massachusetts (home of the now gone but never forgotten legendary Steve’s Ice Cream, started by Steve Herrell on Elm Street in Davis Square, where the ice cream was hand-stirred in the front window in a Nashua, New Hampshire-made four-and-a-half gallon Triple Motion dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer) in 1980, and in 1989, in East Durham, North Carolina.

Midday meant the traditional Thanksgiving Thursday Detroit Lions NFL football game classic. The Detroit Heralds started the tradition in 1917 when they played against the Canton Bulldogs in a 7-0 loss. The Heralds played again in 1920. then the short-lived Detroit Tigers football team played the Chicago Staleys in 1921. The Detroit Panthers played in 1925 and 1926, and the Detroit Wolverines played in 1928. Thanksgiving football in Detroit has been happening for more than a century. Detroit held its first such matchup against the Chicago Bears in 1934 and has played on the holiday every year since 1945. 

In the 1980 game, the Chicago Bears beat the Detroit Lions 23-17.

My New England turkey came from Star Market in Porter Square, I believe, in adjacent Cambridge, although the exact geography is a bit fuzzy after 42 years, while I believe Food Lion was my likely turkey supplier of choice in North Carolina at the other end of the decade in 1989. In New England, Star Market was something of a grocery story chain legend (New England has a lot legends). Started by Stephen P. Mugar in 1915, Star Market by 1980 was owned by Jewel-Osco, another supermarket chain headquartered in Itasca, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. The Star Market I shopped at in Cambridge, I believe, was in a kind of redlined area for grocery stores, so neighbourhood supermarkets were few and far between.

Food Lion for its part had begun in 1957 as a one-store operation in Salisbury, North Carolina, under the name Food Town and was founded by Ralph W. Ketner.

Originally, the Pilgrim Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony celebrated their first Thanksgiving Day on July 8, 1629. The following year, John Winthrop gave his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” where he rightly predicted the colony would be metaphorically, as from salt and light in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, known as the “city on a hill, ” watched by the world.

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop said. “The eyes of all people are upon us … we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”

Almost four centuries later, their purposes perhaps not quite as lofty, Americans now celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. It is the single-biggest domestic travel weekend of the year for Americans going home, wherever that might be, to visit family. While technically speaking, American Thanksgiving is a one-day holiday, like here in Canada, except on a Thursday instead of a Monday, for all intents and purposes it is part of a very long weekend (officially the Wednesday and Friday are not holidays in the United States, just the Thursday, but virtually no one – aside from unfortunate retail store clerks – works the Friday, as those of us who have lived there know.) Just try and get a government official on the telephone after mid-afternoon Wednesday, or all day Friday of American Thanksgiving week if you wish to test this hypothesis.

While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well (as it is this year), even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such was the case in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.

To understand the rationale more fully, harken back to that bygone era where it was quaintly considered bad form for retailers to display Christmas decorations or have Christmas sales before the celebration of Thanksgiving, as opposed to the current day-after Halloween kick-off. Or is it the day after Labor Day now Christmas sales start? One of the two methinks.

Roosevelt, however, had waited until Oct. 31 to announce his thinking on the matter of moving up Thanksgiving by a week 23 days later. The short-notice change in dates affected the holiday plans of millions of Americans; while there was plenty of confusion and many were inconvenienced, others hit pay dirt.

On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.

The Thanksgiving winners in 1939 lived in Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. Those three states observed two Thanksgiving holidays that year; the just-proposed Thursday, Nov. 23, and then they did it all over again a week later on the originally scheduled holiday on Thursday, Nov. 30.

Now, that’s something to express gratitude for, unless your were a turkey taking a double-hit on your numbers possibly in  Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. All told, 23 states and the District of Columbia, of the 48 states in those pre-statehood days for Alaska and Hawaii (both joined the union 20 years later in 1959), recognized Nov. 23 as Thanksgiving in 1939, while 22 states stuck with the original Nov. 30 date as planned.

Gradually, the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving, with some see-sawing back-and-forth and general waffling, took a more permanent hold throughout the United States. Texas was the last state to change its holiday law, observing the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving when there are five Thursdays in the month for the final time on Thursday, Nov. 29, 1956.

The considerable, and for a time in the early 1940s, still ongoing confusion surrounding when Thanksgiving should be celebrated was not surprisingly diffused in the popular culture as ripe material for laughs through cinema, as well as radio. “In the 1940 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon Holiday Highlights, directed by Tex Avery,” Wikipedia notes, “the introduction to a segment about Thanksgiving shows the holiday falling on two different dates, one ‘for Democrats’ and one a week later ‘for Republicans.’”

In the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, a classic black-and-white film, which I borrowed in DVD format from the Thompson Public Library a few years ago, there is a delightful parody where a November calendar appears on which an animated turkey jumps back and forth between the two weeks, until he gives up and shrugs his shoulders at the audience.

And speaking of turkeys getting the last laugh, no discussion of American Thanksgiving is complete, of course, without addressing the issue of the Presidential turkey pardon.

President Joe Biden pardoned two turkeys, Chocolate and Chip, on Monday as he discharged the presidential duty of the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon.

“The votes are in, they’ve been counted and verified, no ballot stuffing, no fowl play. The only red wave this season is going to be if German Shepherd Commander knocks over the cranberry sauce,” Biden told an audience on the White House South Lawn.

President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 clemency to a turkey recorded in an 1865 dispatch by White House reporter Noah Brooks was the origin for the pardoning ceremony, according to the White House Historical Association, a private, nonprofit organization founded in 1961 by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy with a mission to protect, preserve, and provide public access to the rich history of America’s Executive Mansion.

Reports of turkeys as gifts to American presidents can be traced to the 1870s, when Rhode Island poultry dealer Horace Vose began sending well fed birds to the White House. The First Families did not always feast upon Vose’s turkeys, but the yearly offering gained his farm widespread publicity and became a veritable institution at the White House. At Thanksgiving 1913, a turkey-come-lately from Kentucky shared a few minutes of fame with the fine-feathered Rhode Islander. Soon after, in December, Horace Vose died, thus ending an era.

By 1914, the opportunity to give a turkey to a president was open to everyone, and poultry gifts were frequently touched with patriotism, partisanship, and glee. In 1921, an American Legion post furnished bunting for the crate of a gobbler en route from Mississippi to Washington, while a Harding Girls Club in Chicago outfitted a turkey as a flying ace, complete with goggles. First Lady Grace Coolidge accepted a turkey from a Vermont Girl Scout in 1925. The turkey gifts had become established as a national symbol of good cheer.

With animal rights activists picketing nearby, President George H.W. Bush quipped “‘Reprieve,’ ‘keep him going,’ or ‘pardon’: it’s all the same for the turkey, as long as he doesn’t end up on the president’s holiday table.”

Recently, White House mythmakers have claimed that President Harry S. Truman began the tradition of “pardoning” a turkey. However, the Truman Library & Museum disputes the notion that he was the first to do so. The focus on Truman stems from his being the first president to receive a turkey from the Poultry and Egg National Board and the National Turkey Federation. From September to November 1947, announcements of the government encouraging “poultryless Thursdays” grabbed national headlines. Outrage from homemakers, restaurant owners, and the poultry industry was palpable in Washington. This came to a head when the poultry industry pointed out that the upcoming Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, the three big turkey holidays, happened to fall on Thursday. The effort was deflated in time for Thanksgiving, but not before poultry growers had sent crates of live chickens— “Hens for Harry”— to the White House in protest. The turkey they presented to President Truman that December promoted the poultry industry and established an annual news niche that endures today.

While 1947 was the beginning of the official turkey presentation from the poultry industry, the turkey pardon remained a sporadic tradition. In December 1948, Truman accepted two turkeys and remarked that they would “come in handy” for Christmas dinner. There was clearly no plan for these birds to receive a presidential pardon. The Washington Post used both “pardon” and “reprieve” in a 1963 article in which President Kennedy said of the turkey, “Let’s keep him going.” During the latter years of the Nixon presidency, Patricia Nixon accepted the turkeys on behalf of the President and in 1973 sent the bird to the Oxon Hill Children’s Farm.

A piece called “Why presidents pardon turkeys — a history” by Domenico Montanaro, PBS Newshour in November 2014 also offered a comprehensive history of the practice, which you can read at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/presidents-pardon-turkeys-history/#.VHbAtv1lVLA.facebook

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A Year of COVID-19: Missing friends, missing the Hub and Strand Theatre in Thompson, Manitoba

Last night, I was wistful for a very long moment for the pre-pandemic, pre-COVID-19 world, as I spotted the Hub restaurant and the Strand Theatre straight ahead of me downtown on Churchill Drive here in Thompson, Manitoba. After almost a year of takeout cuisine, which I am indeed grateful for, the Hub’s dining room, and perhaps a very rare steak sandwich to enjoy in the company of friends, and/or a movie next-door at the Strand Theatre, reminded me of life before Code Red.

For the last year, I have like many, many other people around the world, focused primarily on the present and putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward, one day at a time. It can be exhausting. Last March, the calendar may have said 31 days, but in truth it was the month without end.

One of the most chilling things, and there have been many, that I’ve heard to date during the COVID-19 pandemic, was this audio clip posted on Twitter last March 21. I heard this brief 30-second clip on Twitter March 24, 2020, the day after the “surge” hit New York City. Tim Mak is National Public Radio (NPR’s) Washington investigative correspondent – and an emergency medical technician (EMT), which is how he got the message. Aside from the subject matter, there is something eerie about that electronically-generated voice on the automated message that went out, with this message:

“This an emergency message. This is a priority request for D.C. MRC volunteers (District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC)…” (https://twitter.com/i/status/1241471610395267084)

The District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC) supports the DC Department of Health (DC Health) in its role as lead for public health and medical emergency preparedness, response and recovery by recruiting, training, and deploying medical and non-medical volunteers to assist with planned events and emergencies.

On March 30, I wrote on Facebook: “Consider this. Ordered earlier this month to “lean forward,” a military term familiar to those who serve in the United States Navy, meaning the willingness to be aggressive, to take risks, the U.S.Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH-20), homeported at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, sailed from port up the Atlantic seaboard Saturday and arrived in New York Harbor this morning.

“The Comfort will provide relief for New York hospitals by taking on non-COVID-19 cases and allowing the hospitals to focus on the most critical patients suffering from the virus.

“Picture this.

“What those sailors, military doctors and nurses, officers, enlisted personnel and civilians aboard the USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) must have been thinking as they answered the call of duty and sailed north into a Biological Armageddon.”

The following day, on March 31, 2020, I posted again on Facebook, “Waking up every morning in March 2020: ‘Red alert. All hands stand to battle stations'” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV30YwXaKJg).

I’ve read, thought and written a fair bit about pandemics and the like over the last 30 years. More than a decade ago on Dec. 4, 2010, when I was editing the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, I penned a story headlined, “Potential influenza pandemic on Garden Hill First Nation, MKO says: Surrounding Island Lake First Nations may also be under the flu gun.”

I wrote: “The novel H1N1 influenza pandemic, which started in Mexico in March 2009, albeit with relatively mild symptoms in most cases, was the first pandemic since the Hong Kong Flu of 1968. It originated in Guangdong Province in southeast China, but the first record of the outbreak was in Hong Kong on July 13, 1968.

“By the end of July, extensive outbreaks were reported in Vietnam and Singapore. By September 1968, Hong Kong Flu reached India, Philippines, northern Australia and Europe. That same month, the virus entered California via returning Vietnam War troops but did not become widespread in the North American until December 1968.

“A vaccine became available in 1969 one month after the Hong Kong flu pandemic peaked in North America. About a million people died worldwide in what are described as “excess” death beyond what be expected in a normal flu season, but still only half the mortality rate of the Asian flu a decade earlier. H1N1 swine flu is the first worldwide influenza pandemic since the Hong Flu of 1968-69.

“A decade earlier, the Asian Flu pandemic of 1957 was an outbreak of avian-origin H2N2 influenza that originated in China in early 1956 and lasted until 1958. It originated from mutation in wild ducks combining with a pre-existing human strain. The virus was first identified in Guizhou and spread to Singapore in February 1957, reaching Hong Kong by April and the United States and Canada by June 1957. Estimates of worldwide deaths caused by the Asian Flu pandemic vary, but the World Health Organization believes it is about two million.

“The Asian Flu strain later mutated through antigenic drift into H3N2, resulting in the milder Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968 and 1969.

“Influenza A viruses are classified into subtypes on the basis of two surface proteins: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N).

“Three subtypes of hemagglutinin (H1, H2 and H3) and two subtypes of neuraminidase (N1 and N2) are recognized among influenza A viruses that have caused widespread human disease, says the Public Health Agency of Canada. “Since 1977 the human H3N2 and human H1N1 influenza A subtypes have contributed to influenza illness to varying degrees each year. It is not yet known if this pattern will be altered by the emergence of the 2009 pandemic virus [A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)]. Immunity to the H and N antigens reduces the likelihood of infection and lessens the severity of disease if infection occurs.”

“Influenza B viruses have evolved into two antigenically distinct lineages since the mid-1980s, represented by B/Yamagata/16/88-like and B/Victoria/2/87-like viruses. Viruses of the B/Yamagata lineage accounted for the majority of isolates in most countries between 1990 and 2001. Viruses belonging to the B/Victoria lineage were not identified outside of Asia between 1991 and 2001, but in March 2001 they re-emerged for the first time in a decade in North America. Since then, viruses from both the B/Yamagata and B/Victoria lineages have variously contributed to influenza illness each year.

“The antigenic characteristics of current and emerging influenza virus strains include A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)-like, A/Perth/16/2009 (H3N2)-like and B/Brisbane/60/2008 (Victoria lineage)-like antigens.”

On Nov. 1, 2019, just before a likely, but not yet conclusively proven, viral species jump to humans, in or around Wuhan, China, that likely sparked  the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, more commonly known as COVID-19, I posted on Facebook on time-lapse tracking of the transmission and evolution of Influenza A (H7N9), the most deadly flu on Earth, which has been circulating in China for the last five years or so. It has a mortality rate of 40 per cent, making it about 200 times more deadly than 2018’s Influenza A (H3N2) flu virus that circulated in Canada.

While influenza isn’t a coronavirus, some of the arguments I made on Oct. 16, 2013 in a editorial for the Thompson Citizen, might sound somewhat  familiar today, “Even if the influenza vaccine only prevents infection 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the time, in the best of cases – meaning that of every 10 people who would have gotten the flu without the shot, three or four still will – flu shots have proven to be effective in slowing the virus down and helping to limit the spread of pandemics,” I wrote. “On the balance of probabilities, you hopefully are helping yourself in getting a flu shot, but you’re almost certainly in any event being altruistic in helping the rest of us in the general population by slowing the spread the virus down.”

I’ve also blogged in soundingsjohnbarker on such esoteric topics as blog posts on “Black Death: Not so bad?” in 2014, “What if the 22nd century means staying at home with long-distance travel a thing of the past?” in 2015, “A still bigger picture: Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF), Samaritan’s Purse, ZMapp and the 2014 Ebola Crisis” in 2018 and, more recently, “The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’” in 2020

Thirty years ago, I wrote a third-year history essay at Trent way back in 1991 about ergot poisoning, from a fungus that commonly forms in wheat, rye, and other grains, and is now known to cause such symptoms as convulsions, vomiting, and hallucinations, possibly triggering the events leading to the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. In 2006. I read Laurie Garrett’s landmark 1994 book, “The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance.”

In 2011, Megan O’Brien was able to tell me she could bring in on inter-library loan to the Thompson Public Library for me a copy of “The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague Of All Time” by John Kelly, published in 2005.

Four years later, I borrowed an audio book version from University College of the North’s Wellington & Madeleine Spence Memorial Library on the Thompson Campus of “Station Eleven”, New York City writer Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel published in 2014, and centred around the fictional “Georgia Flu” pandemic, which is so lethal, and named after the former Soviet republic, that within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed and “all countries and borders have vanished.”

In 2017, also from the UCN library here, I borrowed “The Plague”, a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story from the point of view of an unknown narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran.

I spent Mondays between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. in a comfortable orange chair on the third floor of UCN during the fall of 2019 reading John M. Barry’s book “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History”, chronicling the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic. Barry is an adjunct member of faculty at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.

So, yes, I had some idea of what a pandemic might look like when it arrived a year ago and it did turn out indeed to be the fire this time.

Knowing might be good preparation. But you can only know so much. Nowhere had I read in advance to get ready for a pandemic where perhaps one out of every three carriers might be showing no symptoms and feeling just fine while shedding the virus and transmitting a disease, with multiple variants now, and that varies so much in its effects from person to person. The Chimera, according to Greek mythology, was a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid creature. COVID-19 is its progeny.

And no matter how much you know, it’s not the same as the lived experience of a pandemic where “mask up” is the imperative public health-ordered emergency non-pharmaceutical intervention that taken to brain and heart, along with six-foot physical so-called “social distancing” and restricted travel, might just some day mean dinner at the Hub and a movie at the Strand Theatre again.

That might seem like a distant hope at the moment, and I suppose it is, but I am mindful that individual actions can collectively matter, and instead of the “twindemic” of influenza and COVID-19 public health epidemiologists feared last spring for this winter, the start of the annual flu season in the Northern Hemisphere has been very quiet to date, much like it was in the Southern Hemisphere during their winter season last year during our summer. Since September, the CDC “FluView” – its weekly report on influenza surveillance – has shown all 50 states in shades of green and chartreuse, indicating “minimal” or “low” flu activity. Normally by December, at least some states are painted in oranges and reds for “moderate” and “high.”

In the Southern Hemisphere, where winter stretches from June through August, widespread mask-wearing, rigorous lockdowns and other precautions against Covid-19 transmission drove the flu down to record-low levels. Southern Hemisphere countries help “reseed” influenza viruses in the Northern Hemisphere each year, so a good flu season here year “Down Under” often, not always, means we can reasonably hope for one in the Northern Hemisphere.

And some of it is just seasonal variability. Some flu seasons are worse than others. Flu viruses mutate far more than coronaviruses through antigenic drift, hence the need for a different combination flu vaccine every year.

Since last February, COVID-19 has killed more than 430,000 people in the United States, more  than influenza has in the last five years, notes the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.in Baltimore. COVID-19 has a higher severe disease and mortality rate than influenza in all age groups, except perhaps children under the age of 12. “Influenza is a significant burden on the population, but COVID-19 has had a vastly larger effect,” Johns Hopkins says.

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Riders on the Storm: Brilliance and mental illness; moods, madness and wellness

Kay Redfield Jamison is the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders and a professor of psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins Hospital at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, who catapulted to fame 25 years ago with a bestseller she wrote about her manic depression, titled “An Unquiet Mind.” Jamison “changed the way we think about moods and madness,” says her publisher, Penguin Random House Books.

Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; she has also experienced it firsthand. For even while she was pursuing her career in academic medicine, In the prologue to “An Unquiet Mind,” Jamison was in a manic grip that sent her running around a parking lot at two in the morning. Later in the book, she described the world going dark when she was unable to get out of bed or make sense of the words she tried to read.

She found herself succumbing to the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic depressions that afflicted many of her patients, as her disorder launched her into ruinous spending sprees, episodes of violence, and an attempted suicide. Jamison explored bipolar illness from the dual perspectives of the healer and the healed, revealing both its terrors and the cruel allure that at times prompted her to resist taking medication.

I was working as a part-time reporter at the Kingston Whig-Standard, finishing writing my master’s thesis (“America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’ Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan” ISBN: 0612046591) at Queen’s University when Jamison’s book was first published. I was able to read an advance book review copy of “An Unquiet Mind” at the Whig back in the Summer of 1995.

Aside from being attracted to her elegant and compelling writing, I wanted to read  Jamison’s book for a much more personal reason; my grad school thesis supervisor had told us about his struggles with manic-depressive (bipolar) illness in the autumn of 1993 during a first semester afternoon seminar. I remember the day vividly. While it was a fairly typical overcast and dreary day for that time of year in the Limestone City on Lake Ontario’s north shore, my supervisor was over-dressed in what appeared to be the warmest cardigan in the world, as if he just couldn’t stay warm no matter what he wore or did. At -30°C (-41°C with the wind chill) as it is here in Thompson, Manitoba, as I write these words some 27 years later on Dec. 23, 2020, the cardigan would have been perfect: that day in Kingston so long ago it somehow looked overdone, out of place.

And it would have been just around then, as he was slowly walking around the classroom, that he told his students about how he suffered from manic-depressive (bipolar) illness. In trying to explain it, he put it this way: “I wake up every day and it’s like I’m waking up at 4 a.m. in the morning. That’s how the world looks.” You don’t have to suffer from a mental illness to immediately understand something of how the world appeared to him. Most of us, I think, have a sense of vulnerability, if we’re not blessedly asleep at that hour. Not a lot of good things are known to happen at 4 a.m. in my experience; sort or reminiscent of the dread middle of the night phone ringing with an unwelcome call jarring you out of a deep sleep for what is seldom, or ever, good news. God, grant us sunrise.

I spent the next two years trying to time my meetings and assignment schedule with my supervisor by trying to guess where he’d be in his mood cycle: despondent and depressed, more-or-less “normal,” not overly up or down (a phase that often ran for months, much longer than either his low lows or high highs lasted usually.)  

In the Summer of 1995, I was writing my thesis in the always-chilly-even-in-summer math computer lab in the basement of Jeffery Hall, which has three floors underground, and opened at Queen’s in 1969, housing the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. The hall is named after Ralph L. Jeffery, who was head of mathematics and chair of graduate studies from 1943 to 1960. That’s also when I read  Jamison’s just-published memoir, “An Unquiet Mind.” I hoped reading one professor would give me some insights into another professor, my professor. And it did.

As I read the book, I remember handing in the first draft of my thesis on a Friday afternoon. More than 100 pages. I had it back Monday morning from my supervisor with detailed handwritten notations and insightful, penetrating comments and questions. I was speechless that he found time even to read it over the weekend, much less comment with laser-like brilliant questions that clearly hadn’t occurred to me in the writing.

Flash-forward a quarter of a century. Judy Bolton-Fasman, Jamison’s granddaughter, is the arts and culture writer for JewishBoston.com. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Forward, Tablet Magazine, Cognoscenti and other venues. And her memoir, “Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets,” is forthcoming in fall 2021 from Mandel Vilar Press.

“Almost a century ago, my grandmother was forced into a frigid shower, ostensibly to calm her down during a devastating panic attack,” Bolton-Fasman wrote Nov. 30 at JewishBoston.com (https://www.jewishboston.com/and-then-unquiet-minds-in-a-quiet-time/).. She was told in no uncertain terms to ‘get a hold of herself.’ At one point, Grandma’s physician brother thought she belonged in an asylum. I picture Grandma in that shower rocking back and forth, shivering more from terror than cold.”

“My grandmother’s story came rushing back,” wrote Bolton-Fasman, as I went over my reporting for an event Dec. 7, aptly called “Unquiet Minds in a Quiet Time: Insights on Mental Health, Resilience and Community,” sponsored by the Ruderman Synagogue Inclusion Project (RSIP), a partnership between Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP) and the Ruderman Family Foundation, a private philanthropic foundation established and  managed by the Ruderman family, both of which are based in Boston and support synagogues “in creating communities where people of all abilities are valued equally and participate fully.”

Kay Redfield Jamison turned 74 last June. Her latest book, “Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire” was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Biography in 2018.

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Holy hyperbole, a.k.a. ‘HOLY MOTHER OF GOD – the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! … It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad’

Eric Feigl-Ding’s Jan. 20 tweet on Twitter was one of the first to set off COVID-19 pandemic alarm bells. He is a Washington, D.C.  epidemiologist and health economist, and is currently a visiting scientist in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“HOLY MOTHER OF GOD – the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!!” Feigl-Ding’s tweet read. “How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad – never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career. I’m not exaggerating.” The estimate of the virus’s contagiousness is captured in a variable called R0, or basic reproduction number for COVID-19, and is a key number used in infectious disease modelling for estimating pandemic growth rate. An R0 of 3.8 meant that every person who caught COVID-19 would transmit it in turn to almost four other people.

Feigl-Ding, 37, had tweeted after reading a paper called “Novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV: early estimation of epidemiological parameters and epidemic predictions,” published on Jan. 23, and providing an early estimation of epidemiological parameters and epidemic predictions using case information from Chinese cities and other countries from Jan. 1-22 to fit a mathematical model to estimate outbreak parameters.

Still, there were problems with Feigl-Ding’s tweet, as Alexis C. Madrigal, a staff writer at The Atlantic, noted just eight days later in a piece headlined, “How to Misinform Yourself About the Coronavirus: Even if you avoid the conspiracy theories, tweeting through a global emergency is messy, context-free, and disorienting” (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/china-coronavirus-twitter/605644/), which appeared online Jan. 28.

Feigl-Ding is in no way an unintelligent man or incompetent epidemiologist; by all accounts he is quite the contrary in both disposition and abilities. Nor is this in any way to suggest the COVID-19 pandemic, which hadn’t even been designated a “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC) by the World Health Organization (WHO) on Jan, 20 [that would come Jan. 30], much less a global pandemic [that would come March 11] was not worthy of a five-alarm fire bells general wake-up call or tweet even back then: it was.

His work focuses on the intersection of public health and public policy. Feigl-Ding has published in leading journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, and Health Policy. In 2018, he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination to run for the party in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, located in the south-central region of the state, and encompassing all of Dauphin County, as well as parts of Cumberland County and York County, including the cities of Harrisburg and York. But in his enthusiasm to tweet, he omitted some context, which he now regrets, he says. What he inadvertently omitted primarily were facts such as other infectious diseases, say measles for instance, also have very high R0 numbers (R0s for measles range from 12 to 18), and by the time he tweeted about the paper, the researchers had already lowered their R0 estimate from 3.8 to 2.5. “And R0, for that matter, is not the be-all and end-all of the danger of a virus,” Madrigal points out “Some highly transmissible diseases are not actually that dangerous.”

Madrigal also rightly observed that “one of the realities of the current information ecosystem” is that while “out-and-out conspiracies and hoaxes will draw some attention, it’s really the stuff that’s close to the boundaries of discourse that grabs the most eyeballs. That is, the information that’s plausible, and that fits into a narrative mounting outside the mainstream, gets the most clicks, likes, and retweets. Bonus points if it’s sensational or something that someone might want to censor.” When Twitter launched in March 2006, its timeline structure was simple: Tweets were displayed in reverse chronological order. In other words, each user’s feed contained tweets from their followers, from the most recent tweets onward. For “top tweets” now, Twitter uses an algorithm-powered feed organized by ranking signals. In addition to ranked content from followers, the feed will sometimes feature “who to follow” suggestions and, and content from other accounts. Users can also provide feedback on content shown in the feed by selecting “show less often.”

In an April-June 2017article in ASA footnotes, a publication of the American Sociological Association, R. Tyson Smith, a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, who conducts research in the areas of health, gender, social psychology, criminal justice, and the military, suggested, “Twitter is arguably the best way to reach the greatest number of people, in the quickest fashion, and in the least mediated way.”

Probably still true, but not necessarily always a good thing for academics perhaps, as Eric Feigl-Ding quickly discovered to his chagrin.

In all fairness, who among us hasn’t hit the send button on a tweet, email, Facebook post, or other social media platform expression, a tad too soon in retrospect? Not I, I admit.

Think? Yes. Send? Maybe – but only after a very long pause, which on most social media platforms, and perhaps especially on Twitter, is about as likely as successfully asking a multi-line slot machine player to ease up to dampen some of the audiovisual feedback.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

The World is now Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

The World is now Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

The daily educational program for children debuted on PBS in 1968, after two smaller runs – in 1961 with Misterogers on the CBC, and in 1966 with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on the Boston-based Eastern Educational Network, a forerunner to the Public Broadcasting Service. Every day, Fred Rogers would get home from work, put on a cardigan and sneakers, and talk to his neighbours, delivering lessons on friendship, love, kindness, acceptance, and more. Viewers were an important part of the neighborhood, too. Now, the world is a great social laboratory for putting the ideas and values of Fred Rogers into everyday practice in a time of life and death – a time of the continuous present, without past or future.

As the world hits bottom – which may paradoxically be when it hits the peak for COVID-19 cases, which in the United States, now the world epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic, may come in about two weeks time in mid-April – there will be, and already are around the world, early signs of recovery of a better us, and of a better world.

It is still both late days and early days simultaneously, but the 85-year-old argot of personal recovery can be applied now to public recovery, as well, I think: “One day at a time” and “just for today” should no longer be thought of as just private lifesaving advice for recovering alcoholics and addicts, but a public signpost for all for the rebuilding task that will be ahead, one person and one community at a time. The 12-step movement, dates back to June 1935, when Bill Wilson, a failed New York City stockbroker, and Dr. Bob Smith, an Akron, Ohio physician, both recently or newly sober (particularly Dr. Bob, although Bill W. wasn’t that many months ahead of him on the sobriety curve) became friends and Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) was born in Ohio. Both sayings, “one day at a time” and “just for today” are used interchangeably as both verbal slogans and written mottoes, the former coming from AA, and the latter, also a prayer to some, and a poem to others, from Narcotics Anonymous (NA), formed in 1953. They have proved useful as something pithy and easily grasped by the still-suffering in the early days of recovery, grasping for something tangible to hang onto for just one more second, minute, hour or day, grasping for those words every bit as much as a drowning person grasps for the rung on the ladder or life preserver.

Which is probably as good a description as any of the COVID-19 world we live in today, with a March that has birthed a dread spring in a month that seemingly never ends, where waking up every morning in March 2020 has been like having the voice of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard as a personal alarm clock inside my head, uttering such classic Star Trek lines as “damage report’ and “Red alert. All hands stand to battle stations” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV30YwXaKJg&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1c8IoTcgboKQu3u12DNJ_rRNzvH6k0ZNDK3p3b3KLEGBIZLJ4ktx6XBMI).

Fortunately, Gene Roddenberry has been a reminder to me since 1966 that character, courage and goodness are not proprietary virtues of the religious, non-religious, believers or non-believers. We all can and do share in them. And we’re going to need those virtues, and all of us, believers and non-believers, in the days ahead. In this month of unbelievable sounds and images, where the next day’s sounds and images routinely exceeds the horror and scale of the previous day, two stand out for me, one very well known, the other not so much. The first is the image of the floating hospital United States Navy Ship (USNS) Comfort as it entered New York Harbor March 30 during the Biological Armageddon coronavirus pandemic response in New York City. Mike Segar’s photograph for Reuters illustrates why it is often said “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Ordered to “lean forward,” a military term familiar to those who serve in the United States Navy, meaning the willingness to be aggressive, to take risks, the USNS Comfort (T-AH-20), homeported at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, sailed from port up the Atlantic seaboard Saturday. What those sailors, military doctors and nurses, officers, enlisted personnel and civilians aboard the Comfort must have been thinking as they answered the call of duty and sailed north into a Biological Armageddon. The Comfort will provide relief for New York hospitals by taking on non-COVID-19 cases and allowing the hospitals to focus on the most critical patients suffering from the virus.

The second that stands out for me is a brief audio clip I heard on Twitter March 24, the day after the “surge” hit New York City. Tim Mak is National Public Radio (NPR’s) Washington investigative correspondent – and an emergency medical technician (EMT), which is how he got the message. It is the most chilling on the pandemic I have heard to date. I think that’s because of both the subject matter, but also because there is something eerie about that electronically-generated voice on the automated message that went out:

“This an emergency message. This is a priority request for D.C. MRC volunteers (District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC)…” (https://twitter.com/i/status/1241471610395267084)

The automated message went out March 21 to health care professionals in Washington, D.C.

The District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC) supports the DC Department of Health (DC Health) in its role as lead for public health and medical emergency preparedness, response and recovery by recruiting, training, and deploying medical and non-medical volunteers to assist with planned events and emergencies.

Roddenberry, a Southern Baptist-turned humanist, held and spoke a truth held and spoken by another Southern Baptist, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and others before him: the universe unfolds as it indeed should, and the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. A perfect illustration of this is “Lower Decks,” the 167th episode of the series and the 15th episode of the seventh and final season, which originally aired on Feb. 7, 1994. With remarkable simplicity and brevity, these five sentences from Picard are offered in a ship-wide address from the captain’s ready room off the bridge when Ensign Sito Jaxa, a Bajoran Starfleet officer serving aboard the USS Enterprise, is killed on a covert mission in the line of duty (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2018/09/24/church-of-star-trek-the-next-generation-and-the-moral-arc-of-the-universe/):

“‘To all Starfleet personnel, this is the Captain. It is my sad duty to inform you that a member of the crew, Ensign Sito Jaxa, has been lost in the line of duty. She was the finest example of a Starfleet officer, and a young woman of remarkable courage and strength of character. Her loss will be deeply felt by all who knew her. Picard out’.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40XUt1HU5H8&feature=share)

Writing a decade after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in his 1978  book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, the American historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, commenting in the foreword, said Kennedy “possessed to an exceptional degree what T. S. Eliot called an ‘experiencing nature.’ History changed him, and, had time permitted, he might have changed history. His relationship to his age makes him, I believe, a ‘representative man’ in Emerson’s phrase – one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.”

Such men and women arise from unexpected and unlikely places.

Abraham Lincoln, who in a speech delivered on June 17, 1858, at the close of the Republican state convention at the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield, reaching back to the first century and the words of the Apostle Saint Mark the Evangelist (“And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand”) gave what would become one of the most famous speeches in American history.

Said Lincoln on that late spring day: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free … It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

Five years later, he gave the most famous speech in American history. Republican President Abraham Lincoln’s 273-word “Gettysburg Address,” lasted less than two minutes, and was delivered at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on Nov. 19, 1863. Edward Everett, the former senator and secretary of state – and brilliant Massachusetts orator – who, without notes for two hours, preceded President Lincoln in speaking at Gettysburg, gave a brilliant speech that day, as expected, but Lincoln happened to follow with what we now remember as the “Gettysburg Address.” Lincoln’s speech immediately struck a chord and remains the best-known speech in American history more than 150 years after it was given. Everett wrote a letter to Lincoln the day after their speeches, saying, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

Said Lincoln that long-ago November day: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2a-S3rjDBw&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1LKNwMramCkVoodunLwy1SGqQFCBsejS5cLU9Q0TgVYPPPGs7pFUBxdJw)

I wrote about AIDS in the 1980s. And I remember the climate of fear in 1986 that reporters were not untouched by when we were assigned stories that meant going inside provincial reformatories and federal penitentiaries to interview HIV-positive prisoners in Ontario. The high callings of journalism are to speak truth to power, as well as comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But exactly how AIDS was transmitted in terms of morbidity and mortality was not completely understood 35 years ago. So I watched with surprise and unexpected admiration as C. Everett Koop, an evangelical Christian, who served as surgeon general under U.S. Republican president Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989, and was well known for wearing his uniform as a vice admiral of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, had the singular political courage to speak the truth about the science of AIDS as our knowledge increased. According to the Washington Post, “Koop was the only surgeon general to become a household name” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/empathy-and-compassion-are-the-gifts-of-our-shared-human-experience/).

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton, a Democrat, also got it right in his first inaugural address Jan. 20, 1993 when he said, ”by the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring … we recognize a simple but powerful truth – we need each other. And we must care for one another.” He went on to say, we are “tempered by the knowledge that, but for fate, we – the fortunate and the unfortunate – might have been each other.”

Guardian columnist George Monbiot argued yesterday that power has “migrated not just from private money to the state, but from both market and state to another place altogether: the commons. All over the world, communities have mobilized where governments have failed.”

Joanne Rogers is 92 and the widow of Fred Rogers. She has been getting a lot of telephone calls at her apartment in Pittsburgh, says Los Angeles Times staff writer Amy Kaufman in a March 29 story wondering what Mister Rogers, who died in 2005 at the age of 74, would say and do to cope with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic?

“When Fred was a boy and scary things would happen to him, his mother used to tell him: ‘Freddy, look for the helpers.’ So he would have talked about the helpers,” Joanne said.

“Helpers,” she explained, are those individuals who – even at the height of global chaos – try to find a way to ease the burden for others; folks such as doctors, nurses, grocery store cashiers, and mail carriers.

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Bearing witness: ‘Remember who you are and whom you serve,’ Christianity Today has reminded us

Bear witness.

“Remember who you are and whom you serve,” as Christianity Today has just reminded us.

Jeanette  gave me a subscription to Christianity Today for Christmas this year. While I always try and find my way into Hull’s Family Bookstores when we’re in Winnipeg, where I buy the most recent issue available, my trips to the provincial capital are only occasional, and I have not previously been a subscriber to the magazine, although I have been reading free content online over the years.

This month, I can’t think of any publication more deserving of monetary support.

Kudos to Timothy Dalrymple, president and CEO of Christianity Today, and Mark Galli, outgoing editor in chief of Christianity Today. Since 1956 and its founding by the late Billy Graham, Christianity Today has been a trusted beacon. Part of its “Statement of Faith” proclaims, “When we have turned to God in penitent faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, we are accountable to God for living a life separated from sin and characterized by the fruit of the Spirit. It is our responsibility to contribute by word and deed to the universal spread of the Gospel.”

Nearly 200 evangelical leaders, however, are pushing back against Galli’s recent editorial that called for United States President Donald Trump to be removed from office, saying the piece “offensively” dismissed their support of the president.

Following Trump’s impeachment last week, Galli called Trump a “grossly immoral character.” The criticism was notable as evangelicals are a key constituency of Trump.

On Dec. 22, a number of prominent evangelical leaders affirmed their strong support of the president and slammed the magazine in a letter to Dalrymple: “Your editorial offensively questioned the spiritual integrity and Christian witness of tens-of-millions of believers who take seriously their civic and moral obligations,” the evangelical leaders wrote. “It not only targeted our President; it also targeted those of us who support him, and have supported you,” they added.

The signatories include Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty College; Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council; Ralph Reed, the president of the Faith and Freedom Coalition; and Paula White Cain, Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser who recently joined the White House staff.

Former Republican Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, and former United States House of Representatives Republicans Michele Bachmann and Bob McEwen were also among those who signed the letter.

All that said, it would be a mistake simply to reduce this to a matter of caricature of those we disagree with. Jerry Falwell (as was his father) is too tempting a target. And while it may not be charitable to say so, in truth I have wondered more than once if Franklin Graham is up to being his father’s son. He’s too of-this-world political and too cozy with Trump and his band of cronies for my taste, yet I have great admiration for his work as head of Samaritan’s Purse and the 2014 Ebola crisis, particularly in Liberia in West Africa. Samaritan’s Purse was founded by Dr. Bob Pierce in 1970 as a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization to provide spiritual and physical aid to hurting people around the world. Samaritan’s Purse Canada was established in 1973.

In 2014 Médecins Sans Frontières, also known in English as Doctors Without Borders, the highly respected international humanitarian medical non-governmental organization, founded in Paris in 1971, stretched beyond their limits in Guinea and Sierra Leone in the midst of the deadliest Ebola viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak recorded in West Africa since the disease was discovered in 1976, asked Samaritan’s Purse to take over the management of ELWA (Eternal Love Winning Africa) Hospital – the main facility, founded in 1965 by the medical mission group Serving in Mission (SIM) USA, caring for all Ebola patients in Monrovia, Liberia.

It would be impossible, I think, for most of us to be unmoved by the steps Franklin Graham took to rescue Dr. Kent Brantly, 33, medical director at Samaritan’s Purse Ebola Consolidated Case Management Center in Monrovia, who had contracted Ebola, and who became the first patient ever medically evacuated and repatriated to the United States with a confirmed case of Ebola, to be treated at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, largely due to Graham’s efforts.

Jeanette has taught me many things, but one of the earliest points she made with me when I was writing scathing editorials, was that when it comes to individuals – real flesh-and-blood people – it is often both difficult and dangerous to assign motive and infer intention into hearts we cannot know, and truth be told, that includes men like Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham, as painful as that is to admit at times.

Terry Mattingly, who describes himself as a “prodigal Texan,” and is a parishioner at St. Anne’s Orthodox Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, elucidates the complexities at play well in his post, ” What’s the one thing journalists need to learn from the Christianity Today firestorm?,” which was published yesterday in GetReligion.org, an independent website, which he founded and edits, and which takes as its mission wrestling with issues of religion-beat coverage, as it critiques the mainstream media’s coverage of religion news. The post can be read at: https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2019/12/23/whats-the-one-thing-journalists-need-to-learn-from-the-christianity-today-firestorm

We desperately need more of the likes of John McCandlish Phillips, who died in 2013 at the age of 85, and lived in relative obscurity in New York City, where he was affiliated with the Manhattan-based New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a small evangelical Pentecostal congregation of perhaps three-dozen members; it is a church he helped co-found in 1962.

From time to time, as part of their evangelization effort, Phillips could be heard proselytizing for Christianity in Central Park or the Columbia University campus, near his home. Phillips also spent part of his time managing Thomas E. Lowe, Ltd., a small religious publishing house that buys remaindered religious books and reprints a few others, selling them to Christian bookstores.

John McCandlish Phillips, with his plain-sounding declarative writing voice, also happens to have been perhaps the single best writer who ever tapped the typewriter keys as a reporter at the New York Times. That is until he retired after 21 years at the age of 46 in December 1973. He had joined the paper as a night copy boy in 1952. You can read more about him here at: https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/john-mccandlish-phillips-the-best-reporter-of-his-generation-walked-away-for-god-at-the-top-of-his-game/

As for Mattingly, his father was a Southern Baptist pastor and his mother a language arts teacher. He double-majored in journalism and history at Baylor University and then earned an M.A. at Baylor in Church-State Studies and an M.S. in communications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

He worked as a reporter and religion columnist at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and the Charlotte Observer and the Charlotte News. In 1991, Mattingly began teaching at Denver Seminary and has lectured at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.

While we should tread with caution in judging the intentions of others, as Mattingly reminds of us, we are also called to bear witness through the example of our own lives. While it may only be an errantly attributed aphorism, Abraham Lincoln’s “It is a sin to remain silent when it is your duty to protest” speaks a powerful truth.

More and more, the world is in need of Christian witness such as that from Christianity Today, evangelicalism’s flagship magazine, as an earlier era was moved by the witness of German theologian and pastor Martin Niemöller’s, whose prophetic words are inscribed on a wall in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Hall of Witness, a memorial space on the ground floor:

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out

“Because I was not a Socialist.

“Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out

“Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

“Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out

“Because I was not a Jew.

“Then they came for me-and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Galli’s Dec. 19 editorial, “Trump Should Be Removed from Office,” and Dalrymple’s Dec. 22 update, “The Flag in the Whirlwind: An Update from CT’s President,” are both linked to below:

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/december-web-only/trump-should-be-removed-from-office.html

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/december-web-only/trump-evangelicals-editorial-christianity-today-president.html

As I write these words, I am given to ponder the three Bible verses below:

Joshua 24:14-15:

“Now therefore fear the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in truth: and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt; and serve ye the Lord.

“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

Micah 6:8

“He has shown you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justly,
To love [a]mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God?”

Amos 5:24

“But let justice run down like water,
And righteousness like a mighty stream.”

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Thanksgiving trivia to feast on

Looking back recently at some old newspaper columns and blog posts, I was a bit surprised to realize how much I’ve written over the years about both Canadian Thanksgiving and American Thanksgiving. I don’t write about the kick-off to turkey-gobbling season every fall, but many I do.

Most of my Thanksgiving celebrations have been in Canada, but twice in the 1980s I found myself living in the United States for Thanksgiving on Thursdays. I was living in West Somerville, Massachusetts (home of the now gone but never forgotten legendary Steve’s Ice Cream, started by Steve Herrell on Elm Street in Davis Square, where the ice cream was hand-stirred in the front window in a Nashua, New Hampshire-made four-and-a-half gallon Triple Motion dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer) in 1980, and in 1989, in East Durham, North Carolina.

My New England turkey came from Star Market, while I believe Food Lion was my likely turkey supplier of choice in North Carolina at the other end of the decade in 1989. In New England, Star Market was something of a grocery story chain legend (New England has a lot legends). Started by Stephen P. Mugar in 1915, Star Market by 1980 was owned by Jewel-Osco, another supermarket chain headquartered in Itasca, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. The Star Market I shopped at in Cambridge, I believe, was in a kind of redlined area for grocery stores, so neighbourhood supermarkets were few and far between.

Food Lion for its part had begun in 1957 as a one-store operation in Salisbury, North Carolina, under the name Food Town and was founded by Ralph W. Ketner.

Canadian Thanksgiving, eh? February, April, May, June, October, November: A very moveable feast historically.

But in more recent, years Thanksgiving, if you’re in Canada, has meant celebrating on a Monday, more specifically, the second Monday of October since Jan. 31, 1957. Although Thanksgiving falls on a Monday, many Canadians have their dinner and family get-togethers the day before on the Sunday. While the second Monday of October has been the fixed official Canadian Thanksgiving date for the last 62 years, such has not always been the case. Historically, up until 1957, the Thanksgiving holiday – and even the word “holiday” might be bracketed by quotation marks – was somewhat of a moveable feast, and in that way not dissimilar to the American Thanksgiving holiday, which, while it falls later than our annual harvest observance, also moved around until 1957 when it began to be consistently celebrated on the the fourth Thursday in November across the United States.

The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to the English explorer, Sir Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Orient. Frobisher didn’t succeed but he did establish a settlement in Northern America. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, maybe in the eastern Arctic, maybe in what is now Newfoundland and Labrador, to give thanks for surviving the long journey.

The second Canadian Thanksgiving after Frobisher’s in 1578 was held in Nova Scotia in the late 1750s. Residents of Halifax also commemorated the end of the Seven Years’ War and the Treaty of Paris of 1763, where France formally ceded Canada to the British, with a day of Thanksgiving.

We celebrated Thanksgiving in Upper Canada on June 18, 1816 to mark both the  Treaty of Ghent on Dec. 24, 1814, which ended the War of 1812, and another Treaty of Paris almost 11 months later on Nov. 20, 1815, ending the war between Great Britain and France. Lower Canada had already had their Thanksgiving celebration almost a month before Upper Canada on May 21, 1816.

The cessation of the 1832 cholera epidemic, which claimed 9,000 lives, more than half of them in Lower Canada, was reason enough to have Thanksgiving on Feb. 6, 1833. The restoration of  peace with Russia at the Congress of Paris and a third Treaty of Paris after the three-year Crimean War was enough for the United Province of Canada, made up of Canada East and Canada West, to have Thanksgiving on June 4, 1856. The first Thanksgiving Day after Confederation was on April 15, 1872, to give thanks for the recovery of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) from a serious illness.

In 1879, Parliament declared Nov. 6 a day of Thanksgiving and a national holiday.

Over the years many dates continued to be used for Thanksgiving, the most popular for many years being the third Monday in October. After the end of the First World War, both Armistice Day, as it was then known, and Thanksgiving were celebrated on the Monday of the week in which Nov. 11 fell.

Ten years later, in 1931, the two days became separate holidays and Armistice Day was renamed Remembrance Day.

Finally, on Jan. 31, 1957, Parliament proclaimed, “A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed … to be observed on the second Monday in October.”

An official observance, however, isn’t quite synonymous being an official holiday. Thanksgiving is a statutory holiday across Canada, except for the Atlantic provinces of Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. However, Thanksgiving is a designated retail closing day in Nova Scotia. Just to be clear, if we’re talking turkey.

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Dialing up the future: CompuServe, Tandy’s TRS-80 at RadioShack, and the San Jose Mercury News

The “digital divide” is a term usually used to characterize the gulf between those who have ready access to computers and the internet, and those who do not.

I like to think of it in a more archival sense with the digital divide being a demarcation line between online full-text access to today’s, yesterday’s, along with the year and decades before that’s newspapers, and a world, where even if we all are blessed with a plethora of computers and internet service providers, accessing those newspapers of yesteryear for free is in most cases next to impossible online, unless you are fortunate enough to have access to digitized older newspapers such as can be found at the Thompson Public Library: https://thompsonlibrary.insigniails.com/Library/Digital. Otherwise, archival newspaper research for 1978 still  means scouring bound volumes in a musty newspaper morgue or library, or spending hours in a dark cubicle with one’s head’s buried and eyes straining, spinning reel-after-reel of microfilm or sheet-after-sheet of microfiche.

Does it matter? I think it does. While I can call up verbatim copies of stories I’ve written for most newspapers since 2001, I cannot as easily access stories at a distance in space and time I wrote for the Peterborough Examiner back in 1985 on Paul Croft Jr., who had been a brilliant computer scientist in the late 1960s for Control Data in Minneapolis, but later, while suffering from paranoid delusions stemming from late onset schizophrenia, in 1972 shot and killed in a company parking lot in Canada a co-worker, after hearing voices telling him to do so.

Later, after being released from detention in a mental health institution, but having a relapse into more  mental illness again, largely triggered by not taking his anti-psychotic medications because of their unpleasant side effects, Croft wound up wounding two OPP Tactical Rescue Unit (TRU) officers in 1984, who had arrived at his home in a remote part of Haliburton County, Ontario to execute a warrant under the Ontario Mental Health Act, alleging he had breached the conditions of the lieutenant-governor’s warrant he was subject to, namely by not taking his prescribed meds. By the time I encountered Croft in October 1985, he was on trial in Lindsay, Ontario in what was then the Supreme Court of Ontario, being tried on two counts of attempted murder.

Croft shot the two officers with a high-powered rifle. Both, while injured, recovered and survived.

Again found not guilty by reason of insanity, Croft became among the rarest of the rare among what were then often referred to as the criminally insane: a man detained on not one, but two lieutenant governor’s warrants.

Ditto the 1987-88 series of stories I wrote for the paper on the so-called Peterborough Armouries Conspiracy, which had several dimensions, including a number of police investigations, involving civilian and military police, several court cases, two very tragic suicides, and finally a coroner’s inquest presided over by Ontario’s deputy chief coroner at the time.  Names like Andrew Webster, Ian Shearer, Jeffrey Atkinson,  Lloyd Jackson and Michael Noury have largely been lost in the pre-internet mists of time, recalled only if one happens to have a scrapbook of newspapers clippings, or access to bound volumes of the Peterborough Examiner or its microfilm for 1987-1988.

Without that kind of research access, 30 to 35 years after the events, one’s memories of such stories have a sort of sepia tone or looking through the glass dark quality to them. Although oddly enough you can find a good summary of the Peterborough Armouries Conspiracy story through a June 17, 1987 story headlined “Cyanide deaths a Peterborough nightmare” by Southam News reporter John Kessel, which appeared in among other places, the now Glacier Media-owned Prince George Citizen, which has digitized its older newspapers with the PDF available online at: http://pgnewspapers.pgpl.ca/fedora/repository/pgc%3A1987-06-17-24/PDF/Page%20PDF

I can almost tell you to the day in retrospect when I think the internet “arrived.”

When I arrived at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario as a history graduate student in September 1993, the main library was still Douglas Library on University Avenue, but across the street kitty-corner to it was a massive construction project where they were building the brand-new Stauffer Library on Union Street. This was the end of the brief five-year NDP Bob Rae era in Ontario and while the economy wasn’t strictly speaking in recession, it was far from booming, so projects of such scale in places like Kingston were rare.

I remember using an internet station in the just opened Stauffer Library the next year on one of my first visits in October 1994. The Netscape Navigator browser had just been released that same month, but Queen’s was using the NCSA Mosaic browser, released in 1993, almost the first graphical web browser ever invented. The computer services and library folks at Queen’s got it from day one to their credit. They knew this was going to be so popular with students instantly, the work stations (and there weren’t many) were designed for standing only. How many places in a university library is there no seating? Not many. But they wanted to keep people moving because there would be lineups to use the stations.

I also remember reading the San Jose Mercury News online because it was in Silicon Valley and one of the very first papers in North America online. Today its online archive goes back to June 1985. The funny thing is, the San Jose Mercury News recognized its brief moment in history and for a few years anyway punched well above its weight, doing fine investigative work, both in print and online; a small regional paper no one had ever heard of before the early 1990s unless they lived in Southern California. In its brief shining moment, the San Jose Mercury News had 400 people in its newsroom, revenues of $300 million and profit margins of more than 30 per cent, a bureau in Hanoi, and netted a Pulitzer Prize for foreign news.

In 1994, we all knew intuitively the world had changed with the internet and graphical web browsers. I had sent my first e-mail from Trent University in Peterborough more than three years earlier in the spring of 1991 from the Thomas J. Bata Library on their “Ivory”  server (someone in computer services seemingly had a sense of humour), and was also sitting down as I recall. That was neat, but this was on a whole other scale entirely.

I realized in July 1995, as I was finishing up writing America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’ Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan for my master’s thesis in 20th century American history on the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989, that my class would likely be the last Queen’s University history class where students, including me, had few online citations in their footnotes or included in their bibliographies, and the style of such citations was still very much in development.

While the San Jose Mercury News is often thought of as pioneering in its online venture, the first newspaper to go online was The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio way back on July 1, 1980.  It was part of a unique CompuServe and Associated Press experiment about the potential of online papers. Eventually other AP member newspapers were part of the project, including the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, The Virginian-Pilot, The Middlesex News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But it was The Columbus Dispatch that published the first “online” newspaper when it began beaming news stories through the CompuServe dial-up service. The paper was the first daily in the United States to test a technology that enabled the day’s news to flow into home computers at 300 words per minute. Users paid $5 per hour for the service. “To become a subscriber,” the paper reported at the time, “a resident will have to have a home computer.  Such equipment is now available in electronics shops.” If you had Tandy’s TRS-80 from RadioShack, founded in 1921 as a mail-order retailer for amateur ham-radio operators and maritime communications officers on Brattle Street in Boston by two London-born brothers, Theodore and Milton Deutschmann, who named the company after the compartment that housed the wireless equipment for ham radios, and a modem with access to the online CompuServe dial-up service, you were ready to go, or at least until the pioneering online experiment ended in 1982.

Launched in November 1977, the $600 TRS-80 was one of the first mass-market personal computers with about 16K of memory and a 12-inch-square monitor with one shade of gray characters and no graphics, using software designed by a still obscure start-up named Microsoft, founded 2½ years earlier in April 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

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