Editor's Corner

By Mary E. Adair

May 2012

"Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it."--Mark Twain

Birthday time in your editor's family: after great grandson Chess on the 4th, a veritable parade of dear ones celebrate throughout May. The cooking editor has a different kind of celebration treat ("Cookin' With Leo") and it sounds yummy. So sending wishes out to him and his daughter, many grandchildren, etc.

May is also when we observe Memorial Day and John Blair mentions it in his "Always Looking -" column. Other columns are LC Van Savage's "Consider This" which has her bearing down on pronunciation, and Eric Shackle's column on "Walt Whitman's Newspapers;" Mattie tickles our funny bone with "Irish Eyes" while Thomas F. O'Neill has a more serious look at crime here and there. Peg Jones relates an incident of angel intervention for her personally in "Angel Whispers."

This issue also features a dozen poems, beginning with a tribute by Bud Lemire, "My Friend John." Bud Lemire is expanding his photographic expertise and shares many pics of the water fowl in his area. The water scenes at various times of the day are so beautiful, we are taking this opportunity to show one here at the bottom of our column. Thank you, Bud.

John Blair's poems are: "O Night Without A Moon," "Ripples," "Mist," "I've Never Seen A Moor," "Keys," and "Song of The Lark." Bruce Clifford's five poems begin with "Don't Mind Me." Others by him are: "God Like," "It's Bringing Me Down," "Walking into The Sun," and "What Are We Doing Here."

We are pleased to welcome a new author, Patricia Stalcup, with the short story "True North," a moving experience.

Mark Crocker adds Part B of the fantasy "Rabbo Tales II, Chapter 4 - Names" with sophisticated main character, Rabbo.

See you in June.

---

Click on Mary E. Adair for bio and list of other works published by Pencil Stubs Online.This issue appears in the ezine at www.pencilstubs.com and also in the blog www.pencilstubs.net with the capability of adding comments at the latter.
We invite you to become a fan of our publication at FaceBook.

Photograph by Bud Lemire in Escanaba

 

My Friend John

By Bud Lemire

 

I met you in the Escanaba Taxi several years ago
That was the beginning because one day I'd know
The caring man man with the humorous side
An intelligent guy who held a smile so wide

When we played dice, and you joined in the game
With your presence, it just wasn't the same
You'd sing a song, with each shake you took
Then we'd all stop and take a look
You weren't afraid to take chances on every turn
It's just like life, because that's how we learn

I remember one night I played the TV Themes for Tony and you
You were guessing the classics, there was so much you knew
I saw you playing Scrabble alone late at night
I'd stop in to say hello and see if everything was alright
You spent many nights playing Hangman with me
On your turn you always had a special category

You were coughing a lot and falling down
The smiling face was now wearing a frown
I recall one night when you fell from your chair
You were lost in your thoughts that you would share

I knew you've been thinking of your life here
Yet somehow you always seemed to conquer your fear
You fought every challenge that came your way
I'll remember you John, as I do every day

Life can be painful, and we each have a choice
When making decisions, wait, do I hear a voice?
“It's alright little pilgrim, I have no more pain”
I know it was John Hyry, yet it sounded like John Wayne
He sits with Angels in the Heavenly place
I see images of him with a smiling face

©April 5, 2012 Bud Lemire

---

Click on Bud Lemire for bio and list of other works published by Pencil Stubs Online.

True North

By Patricia Stalcup

Corner of Carpenter Road and Kansas Avenue
Modesto, California

Monday, February 28, 2005  Upon arriving at the bus stop after work today, I noticed an unkempt man sitting under the pavilion. His hair was long and unstyled and his beard was growing wild. He wore a pair of beat-up, dirty, old jeans and a shirt from which the color faded long ago. Once-white tennis shoes looked as though he found them in a dumpster somewhere and no socks finished off the look.

I took a seat on the bench outside the pavilion. Just as I seated myself, he looked over at me, smiled and said, “Hello,” as though he thought he knew me. I could tell by the gentleness in his eyes and the tone of his voice that he was harmless. He got up, walked around the enclosure and sat next to me. He spoke as though I was his lifelong friend, telling me how thirty years ago he registered for the U.S. Marines right from this very town. He told me how much the town developed since then and how all the new buildings, streets and cars took over this once only orchard-and-cow town.

He told me about a truck he once owned, said it was just like the one sitting at the red light at the corner and how he thought it might actually be his. But he figured they installed that sliding window in the back themselves. Then he said, "Man, it’s a shame someone would steal a man’s truck from him while he's inside the church." I saw tears flood his eyes while he gazed at that old truck. He went on about how he slept in that truck. How the padlocks on the doors were installed by him and that there couldn’t possibly be another one like it anywhere. After the truck drove away, he said that he reported it stolen to the police, but they had no records of him ever owning one.

He shrugged his shoulders and started going on about the two tall evergreen trees that were planted side-by-side across the way and how he always used to carry his compass with him. He discovered that whenever he saw those types of trees they were always growing in pairs and no matter where they were, his compass would always read due north. I could only assume what he meant by this, after all, if he were to approach the trees from the other direction, he’d be headed south. But he told me that if I were to start walking right toward the center of those two trees, I’d end up in Alaska, I couldn't get lost. He went on about a trip he made to Alaska. About all the trees just like that pair that he found on his way there and how they were also planted due north (I began thinking of him as “Alaska,” true north. Couldn’t get lost; Always know where you’re going).

He spoke of a time that he and some other handicapped fellows went to San Francisco. They protested the way bus drivers would just open the door and let people on. Sometimes they’d get on the wrong bus, so they created a rule just because of him and his comrades who joined him there that day. Now drivers have to pull up to the stop and yell out the door what bus it is or where it’s headed (Couldn’t get lost; always know where you’re going).

“Which bus are you waiting on?” he asked.

“The 36.”

"Okay, there’s your bus.”

I looked down the street and saw it was the 26 instead. When it arrived at the stop, he kept talking and smiling, so I stopped him and asked, “Hey, did you need to catch the 26?”

“No,” he said. He smiled, got up with his cane and started walking toward the corner. “Can’t get lost, I know where I’m going.”

A corner he’d never reach…

The poor man dropped and, before I could get to him, he took his last breath.

(According to his compass his eyes were fixed true north, as though his last vision in life was the Rose Line setting directly between those two trees and aiming straight towards heaven; “Alaska” was never lost at all.)

©Patricia Stalcup

---

Click on Patricia Stalcup  for bio and list of other works published by Pencil Stubs Online.

Cookin' With Leo

By Leocthasme

Birthday Goodies for Your Cooking Editor
And His Family

Ok, so May is the Birth month of most of the members of your famous recipe writer’s family. Mary, your editor of Pencil Stubs, has a birthday on the 8th. Ten days later on the 18th, it’s my birthday and my daughter’s. That was a great birthday present for dad since daughter was born on his birthday about 30 years later. Her mom’s was easy to remember too, although not in May, it was December 31st. But getting back to May, all sort of assorted cousins, nephews, nieces, and such have birthdays this month. So here is a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to all us’ns with May birthdays. And here is some goodies to celebrate with, I’ll call ‘em
Cinnamon/Apple Crispies. Here’s what ya need:

• 10 medium size tart apples (peel and slice real thin) and I like this with them green Granny Smiths but some like red Rome Beauty’s.
• 2 Cups Original Bisquick™ mix
• 2 Cups brown sugar, packed down
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• ½ Cup firm butter

And here’s what ya do next:

1. Heat oven to 375°

2. Use 13x9-inch pan, don’t grease it, and scatter apples evenly in it

3. Stir next 3 ingredients together in a bowl then cut in butter til crumbly.

4. Sprinkle bowl mixture over apples and bake uncovered.

5. Check in about 35 minutes if apples are getting tender, if not cook a bit more.

(Tastes great while still warm to top with ice cream.)

This treat is safer than a cake with all them candles, ya heah?

---

Click on Leocthasme for bio and list of other works published by Pencil Stubs Online.

Eric Shackle's Column

By Eric Shackle

Walt Whitman's Western Newspapers

Famous American poet Walt Whitman, who once edited New York's Brooklyn Eagle, wrote in his book November Boughs (1888): "Among the far-west newspapers have been, or are, The Fairplay (Colorado) Flume, The Solid Muldoon, of Ouray, The Tombstone Epitaph, of Nevada, The Jimplecute, of Texas, and The Bazoo, of Sedalia, Missouri."
Checking the internet, we find that three of those newspapers are still in business. Walt was only 19 , when he was made editor-in-chief of The Long Islander,which went broke within a year of its founding. Whitman refused to give up, and within a few years he became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Five years later, in 1848, he was fired again, because of his outspoken support for absolition of slavery. Undeterred, Whitman immediately set out for New Orleans to visit his brother Jeff.
While there, he became an editor for the New Orleans Crescent, but returned to Brooklyn within a few months to become editor of The Brooklyn Times. At the same time he worked for the arts-oriented periodical, the Democratic Review.
What has become of those far-west newspapers Whitman mentioned? Let's visit them, one at a time.

FAIRPLAY FLUME
The Fairplay Flume has undergone more than a dozen changes to its masthead over the years. One of them was sub-titled The Paper With A Mission and Without A Muzzle.
Today the sub-title is The Park County Republican's Fairplay Flume.
Ten years ago, its then editor Robin Kepple told me "We understand The Flume acquired its name due to the vast amount of mining in Fairplay and Park County. A flume, as you probably know, is designed to channel water, logs, etc. from one place to another. In Fairplay's case, a flume was used to channel rocks, minerals and tailings from one place to another in the endless pursuit of gold.
"Some folks believe the name Flume was selected because the newspaper helps 'channel' information. I am not certain if this is really the reason for the name or not."
The Flume is now printed not in Fairplay, but in the nearby town of Bailey, which is also the home of the strangely-named Id-Ra-Ha-Je summer camps. That's shorthand for I'd Rather Have Jesus.
Today, the Flume's website says, "The Park County Republican and Fairplay Flume is published every Friday and is the official newspaper in Park County, Colorado.
"The Flume, established in 1879, is almost as old as the county it serves - Park County, Colorado, which was formed in 1861. Park County lies just west of Jefferson County, the westernmost and most mountainous of the seven counties that are typically used in defining metro Denver.
"Headquartered in Bailey, an unincorporated town in the northeastern part of the county, The Flume covers all areas of life in Park County, including business, politics, the courts, weather, crime, festivals, fires and more.
"At the core of the stories in The Flume are the residents themselves, now numbering more than 16,000 in a county that's 83 percent bigger than Rhode Island and nearly as big as Delaware." THE SOLID MULDOON
This newspaper was founded on September 5, 1879, and, through a series of name changes and merges, eventually became the present-day Durango Herald.
The newspaper didn't pull its punches. A local historian records that "David Day, a Medal of Honor winner for heroism at Vicksburg, had the distinction of having 42 libel suits pending at the same time [1900] for his raw and bitter articles in The Solid Muldoon newspaper of Ouray and Durango." Maybe that's why it went out of business.
The original Solid Muldoon was the name given to a mysterious "prehistoric human body" dug up near Beulah, Colorado, in 1877. The seven-and-a-half foot stone man was thought to be the "missing link" between apes and humans. "There can be no question about the genuineness of this piece of statuary" said the Denver Daily Times.
It was later revealed that George Hull, perpetrator of a previous hoax featuring the Cardiff Giant, had spent three years fashioning his second "petrified man", using mortar, rock dust, clay, plaster, ground bones, blood and meat. He kiln-fired the figure for many days and then buried it.
A few months later, as the celebration of Colorado's year-old statehood approached, the statue was "discovered" by William Conant, who had once worked for the legendary showman P.T. Barnum. News of the find quickly spread to Pueblo, Denver, and eventually to New York.
The statue was named the Solid Muldoon after William Muldoon, a famous wrestler and strongman who had been honored in a popular song. Displayed in New York, it attracted large crowds until an unpaid business associate of Hull revealed the hoax to the New York Tribune, and the statue was seen no more. Muldoon was chairman of the New York State Boxing Commission from 1921 to 1923.
Rudyard Kipling, a ballad and prose writer as famous in England as Whitman was in the United States, wrote a piece entitled The Solid Muldoon, one of seven short stories in his book The Soldiers Three, published in 1890.
The world-famous TOMBSTONE EPITAPH in Arizona, was founded on the Southwestern frontier on May 1, 1880 by John P. Clum, who proclaimed in the first issue No Tombstone is complete without an Epitaph. Souvenir editions detailing the O.K. Corral shootout can be bought from the Tombstone Epitaph Corp, whose shop displays old type cases and the original printing press.
A local historian wrote "Clum was the quintessential frontier administrator. As an Indian agent, he dealt with great Apaches warriors like Geronimo and Naiche, son of Cochise.
"As mayor and editor of the Tombstone Epitaph, Clum had much to do in helping to foment the high levels of tension in Tombstone. After the street fight and subsequent trial, Clum learned he was on a 'deathlist' made up by the cowboy gang.
"In December 1881, Clum narrowly escaped what he considered an assassination attempt when highwaymen attempted to rob the stagecoach he was in. Clum was a life-long friend of Wyatt Earp and was one of Earp's pallbearers at his funeral."
The original Tombstone Epitaph is published monthly as a national historic edition. It contains original articles about the old west written by western history writers.
A small local edition of the Epitaph is now published by students of the University of Arizona Department of Journalism. Its sub-title reads: 116 Years In The Town Too Tough To Die. No Tombstone Is Complete Without Its Epitaph.
JEFFERSON JIMPLECUTE
The Texas weekly, the Jefferson Jimplecute, was founded as a daily in 1848, when Jefferson was a thriving Red River town. The "Jimp," as the locals call it, sells about 2400 copies. How did it get its name? No one knows. At one stage it displayed, beneath its masthead title, words which formed an acronym: Join Industry, Manufacturing, Planting, Labor, Energy (and) Capital (in) Unity Together Everlasting. However, a local history book says that that phrase first appeared long after the paper was founded.
Amber Cullen, managing editor of The Jimplecute, has just emailed me: "The editor in chief/ founder of the paper (name unknown) when piecing together the letters for the front page flag- with the old metal 'stamps' (the old way of printing) - he dropped the box of letters to the floor, and in a fit, he picked up a handful and jumbled them back in and Jimplecute was the name that arose.
The acronym did come later, and still runs on our pages today!"
SPRING PLACE JIMPLECUTE
Strangely, a second newspaper named Jimplecute was published in the small Georgia town of Spring Place (688 miles by road from Jefferson) from 1879 to 1903, but here again no one knows how it was named, or whether it had any connection with its Texan namesake.
SEDALIA Missouri BAZOO
This newspaper was published from 1881 to1895.

LINKS:
Walt Whitman - Slang in America
Durango Herald
Tombstone Epitaph
The Jimplecute, Jefferson,Texas

Posted Monday, 5 March 2012, From Sydney, Australia.

---

Click on  Eric Shackle for bio and list of other works published by Pencil Stubs Online
Author's Blog.