When houses were affordable?

 In 1937, the median American household income was $723, the average, according to the Social Security Administration, was $890. That's with, usually, only the husband working. The inflation factor to convert that to 2025 dollars is 22.28.

In the first quarter of 2025, the median household income was  $80,610, the average $82,373. That's with, almost always, both husband and wife working.

 The houses pictured here, from a 1937 issue of Life, cost between $3,000 (upper left) and $6,000 (the two next to the bottom; the bottom house is $4,000), so between $66,840 and $133,680 in inflated dollars. In the first quarter of 2025, the average house price was $503,800.

So in 1937, if we take the average house price to be around $4,500, a house cost something like five or six times a typical family's annual income. And in 2025, a house costs roughly six times a typical family's annual income.  

What kind of amenities did houses in 1937 have?  Take a look:

Of course, a lot has changed in the country since 1937, much of it, maybe most of it, not for the better. For example, in 1937, the average house price in the Richmond district of San Francisco was around $3,500.  Today it is over $1.8 million.  So back then an ordinary working stiff could buy a home in a lovely part of the country, ride a trolley bus downtown or to the wharves to a job that paid him enough to own that house and support his family. His wife could shop at the local corner store and volunteer with the PTA and the library. His kids could walk to safe, disciplined schools that actually taught math and science, history and literature. On his days off he could take his family to Golden Gate Park or other safe and enjoyable parts of the city. Without owning a car. Today?  He couldn't afford a house within two hours of San Francisco, and that would be with his wife working. The schools he can afford for his kids are pointless, violent child warehouses.  He needs a car, and so does his wife, not only to get to work, but also just to get groceries. And crime....

Now you may say that there are still plenty of affordable housing areas in the country, and no doubt there are.  But are they in delightful areas by the ocean or a lake with lovely mountain views? Are they crime free with excellent schools? Are they close to cultural amenities like world-class museums, concert halls, theaters? Are there plentiful, well-paying jobs within a short bus-ride (a safe, clean bus ride)? Are there corner stores and shops within walking distance of home the wife can visit daily for fresh foods for her family?

Are they? Are there?

The first god

Some claim the origin of song
was a war cry.
Some say it was a rhyme
telling the farmers when to plant and reap.
Don't they know the first song was a lullaby
pulled from a mother's sleep?

 

 

Depends on your enemy

 

A Ranger SBD dive bomber flying over a Norwegian fjord.

The USS Ranger spent almost all its wartime career in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, blasting targets from French Morocco  to Norway. Winston Churchill requested it reinforce the British Indian Ocean fleet after the Japanese obliterated it, but Admiral King refused. It sank the French battleship Jean Bart during Operation Torch. The Germans claimed to have sunk it four times, but it never suffered a scratch from enemy action, and its fighters and dive bombers cut a wide swath through the enemy.  While hunting off  Norway, sinking tens of thousands of tons of German shipping, Churchill personally requested she bewithdrawn. The Brits were afraid she'd sink the Tirpitz before they did. Notice in the photo to the left above how happy and carefree her pilots are.  No worries have they!
Why did the Ranger spend its time in the Atlantic?  Because it was considered too slow and vulnerable to risk being deployed in the Pacific against the Japanese, who were a most formidable foe, fierce, fanatic and fatalistic.  They expected to die in the war and intended to take you with them.
Now look at the photo to the lower right.  It's of pilots in the ready room of the USS Hornet.  They don't look so happy.  These men faced the Japanese, battling them at Midway and during the Guadalcanal campaign.  The Hornet was sunk in fierce fighting during the Battle of Santa Cruz, less than a year into the Pacific War.  They had reason to be glum.
In the photo directly below, pilots about to set off on a mission against the Japanese listen to a reading from the Bible and pray together, recognizing that there is a good chance they won't come back, and if they are shot down, survive and are captured by the Japanese, they will need all the strength God can provide them to endure the ordeal they will face.
What verse were they reading?  That's lost in time.  But perhaps Romans 5:3~5:
"We glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope."
What verse do you think they were reading?  It's far enough back in the book that it might be something from Revelations, perhaps 19:11 --
"I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war."
Or perhaps it was 21:4 --
"He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." 

Hornet dying under the blows of the Japanese.

 

 

 

 

 

Time

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

The Last Things I'll Remember

by Joyce Sutphen

The partly open hay barn door, white frame around the darkness,
the broken board, small enough for a child
to slip through.

Walking in the cornfields in late July, green tassels overhead,
the slap of flat leaves as we pass, silent
and invisible from any road.

Hollyhocks leaning against the stucco house, peonies heavy
as fruit, drooping their deep heads
on the dog house roof.

Lilac bushes between the lawn and the woods,
a tractor shifting from one gear into
the next, the throttle opened,

the smell of cut hay, rain coming across the river,
the drone of the hammer mill,
milk machines at dawn. 

 

Elegy for a Walnut Tree

by W. S. Merwin

Old friend now there is no one alive
who remembers when you were young
it was high summer when I first saw you
in the blaze of day most of my life ago
with the dry grass whispering in your shade
and already you had lived through wars
and echoes of wars around your silence
through days of parting and seasons of absence
with the house emptying as the years went their way
until it was home to bats and swallows
and still when spring climbed toward summer
you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers
of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened
you and the seasons spoke the same language
and all these years I have looked through your limbs
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world 

 

 Grandma's Grave

by Freya Manfred

Mother and I brush long drifts of snow from the gravestones
of my great grandfather and grandmother, great uncle and aunt,
two of mother's brothers, each less than a year old,
and her last-born brother, George Shorba, dead at sixteen:
1925-1942
A Mastermind. My Beloved Son.
But we can't find the grave of Grandma, who buried all the rest.

Mother stands dark-browed and musing, under the pines,
and I imagine her as a child, wondering why her mother
left home so often to tend the sick, the dying, the dead.
Borrowing a shovel, she digs, until she uncovers:
1889-1962
Mary Shorba
Mother almost never cries, but she does now. She stares
at this stone as if it were the answer to all the hidden things. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joan of Arc

 

Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for heresy in Rouen, France, on this date in 1431 during the Hundred Years War between France and England. When she was still a teenager, she heard the voice of God telling her to help defeat the English. At the battle of Orleans, she led the French army bearing a flag with Jesus' name written across it, and the English were defeated. She continued fighting battles until May 23, 1430, when she was captured by enemy soldiers. They turned her over to the Catholic church to be tried as a heretic, idolater, and sorcerer. Her enemies believed that the only way they could have lost in battle to a woman was if she had used witchcraft.

Her trial lasted for months. The judges hoped to trick her into saying something that would incriminate her as a witch or an idolater, so they asked endless questions about all aspects of her life. They were especially interested in her childhood. Because the transcripts of the trial were recorded, we know more about her early life than any other person of her time.

Joan testified that she first started hearing divine voices when she was 13 while working in her father's garden. When God commanded her to join the battle against the English, she told her parents she was going to help her cousin deliver a baby. The judges asked her if she felt guilty for leaving her parents, and she said, "Since God commanded it, had I had a hundred fathers and a hundred mothers, had I been born a king's daughter, I should have departed."

When she wasn't being interrogated, she was chained to a wooden block in a dungeon cell. After months of questioning, she was told that if she didn't sign a confession, she would be put to death. She finally signed it, but a few days later she renounced the confession, and on this day in 1431, she was burned at the stake. She was 19 years old.

Here is a retelling of the story in a "you are there" radio news format as part of the series CBS Is There, aired over CBS radio on February 28, 1947. The lead "reporter" is real newsman John Daly. Daly was the first to report the attack on Pearl Harbor and the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. He was in Italy and reported Gen. George Patton's slapping of soldiers suffering from what today we would call PTSD. In 1959, he was in Moscow and reported on the famous "kitchen debate" between Richard Nixon and Nikita Krushchev.

 

Memorial Day on Guam

 Every Memorial Day, 3,055 flags are placed at Asan Memorial Beach Park in Guam to commemorate each individual civilian and serviceman who was killed during the Japanese invasion, occupation, and American liberation of the Island where America's day begins. The Third Marine Division landed at Asan on July 21, 1944, ferried ashore by 180 armored landing vehicles, 20 of which were destroyed by enemy artillery fire before they made the beach. The Marines then assaulted the dug-in Japanese troops who occupied the high ground you can see in the video.
The Army 77th Division attacked Agat.
During the ensuing 21 days of fighting, 1,866 American marines and soldiers were killed, mostly during the first week of the invasion, when Japanese resistance was strongest.

Same gun (?) many decades later.

A Japanese six-inch battery on Chonito Cliff, 
Asan beachhead, Guam, after the battle.

Asan was also where a field hospital was set up, once the area was believed cleared of the enemy and safe. Japanese troops regrouped and attacked it, shooting doctors and nurses, bayoneting  patients in their beds before being driven out.

 The Japanese had behaved horrifically to Guamanians during  their occupation, as they did in most of the lands they conquered, so much so that even today, 81 years later, Liberation Day is celebrated island-wide on Guam.  The Japanese forced essentially all the  men on Guam to be slave labor, an estimated 15,000 persons, to build airfields and defensive positions.  They routinely raped women and children.  They massacred dozens of Chamorros, the native Guamanians, in  Fena, Merizo, Agat, and Yigo.

The Fena caves where one of the most rotten mass killings took place is on Big Navy and I've visited the site.  It's hard to imagine what sick bastards the Japanese were.  Here's a recounting of the episode from Guampedia. Please check it out.

Fena Massacre

 

This is actually a commemoration on Guam of the
Battle of Midway that occurs a week or so after
Memorial Day.  But it shows how important the
events of the war against Japan still are in
that part of the world.
The photo was taken some years ago. Who's that
little girl crying because she doesn't want to
stand in the hot sun by all those stupid flags?

As I've mentioned, I spent a lot of my childhood in Japan, and, by and large, the Japanese seemed like fine, decent people.  But when I learned of the monstrous things they did in China and during the Pacific War and have gotten away with; in fact being seen as victims (oh, please!) of the evil, racist Americans...I couldn't help but look at them with an estimating eye. One may smile and smile and be a villain said Hamlet about King Claudius and so it may be said, we should not forget, about the Japanese.  

The Chamorros don't forget, even though their island, a bit bigger than Santa Catalina Island off the coast of southern California, is inundated with hundreds of thousands of Japanese tourists annually. We shouldn't either.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nothing much

 

The more I read various posts and comments on Substack and elsewhere, the more I realize how little in common I have with these writers and maybe most of the rest of society.  This is not a new conclusion so much as it is a reinforced one.  As an armed services brat (born, raised and transferred), I grew up mostly overseas and so lived a life far from that of a normal American.  

US military bases in Japan.

I was left out of most of the cultural references and key social highlights of a typical person of my generation. I didn't see the TV shows -- never saw an episode of Friends or South Park or Sex in the City -- only heard a selection of the popular songs of the day, certainly didn't hear anything out of the Top 40, especially not anything niche, localized or otherwise appealing to a limited audience, never saw the the TV commercials that everybody liked or hated -- the Geico caveman, Donald Trump and Pizza Hut -- wasn't aware of the political squabbles or the politicians and political commenters involved, didn't participate in the fads and fashions of people my age in the States -- I never planked or wore skinny jeans under my dress or sported a whale tail, never wore fake nerd glasses and posted selfies of myself, hands raised, fingers curled like claws, with the caption "Rawr!" I never used L33T speak, never even heard of it. I did used to tYpE lIkE *t*H*i*S oN y*A*h*O*o  I*M W*i*T*h mY ¡hOmE! ¡cReW! And I used Yahoo audibles with enthusiasm and frequency -- this one below left was my favorite. But that's about it.

I wasn't really from anywhere and had no hometown. But I had lived in lots of places -- Misawa, Yokosuka, Atsugi, Sasebo in Japan, Sigonella, Gaeta and Naples in Italy, Souda Bay, Crete, Rota, Spain, Guam, plus Whidbey Island and North Island.... One year, I went to 11 different schools.  "Class, this is our newest member. Go ahead, introduce yourself."  "Thank you, Miss Gump. My name is Wanda and...." -- out comes the Shepherd's crook and I'm jerked away to another school maybe in another country, maybe on the other side of the world.

I learned to shut up about all that when I settled stateside to finish high school, the same as I learned not to mention I was fluent in Japanese. The other kids thought I was lying or just weird. "Wait, what? You've climbed Mt. Etna and Mt Fuji? And skied both the Italian and Japanese alps? Oh, sure you have!" (belly punch)

Then in the service myself it was more time overseas, often in the same places I grew up in and in some cases where my parents and grandparents on both sides, they having been in the service, too, also lived. My grandfather was stationed at Atsugi, as was my father, and as was I, and now my little girl has, not been stationed (yet), but lived there, too. At one point, I served aboard the same aircraft carrier as my father had.

Another grandfather, in the Air Force in the 1950s, lived with his family in Washington Heights, the American housing complex in Tokyo located where the 1964 Olympic Stadium and Yoyogi Park are today. Before we Americans took it over, it was a Japanese Army Air Force facility; in fact, it was where the first airplane ever flew in Japan.

 I once saw an old Mainichi Graphic, a sort of clone of the picture magazine Life, that they had saved that had published a picture of them barbecuing in their back yard. The photo was taken through a chain link fence with a telephoto lens.  The caption read that American military in Japan were so poor that their houses didn't even have kitchens so they were forced to cook outside.  

That photo was a lesson to me in how people willfully misunderstand each other and willfully spread those misunderstandings to denigrate others and assert their own superiority.  In this particular case, the Japanese author of the story could simply have asked American military public relations to explain what was happening in the photograph and written about American customs and pastimes unfamiliar to Japanese.  But he didn't do that.  He wrote negatively about Americans to assure his Japanese readers that they were superior to these foreigners polluting their homeland.

I've walked around that area of Harajuku and Yoyogi and probably have been in the same spot or near it where the house my grandfather lived in back in the early 1950s once stood. 

I come from a long
line of service members
and their brats.

Anyway, growing up I was familiar with all the cool places to hang out in Catania in Sicily or where not to venture in Naples, or where that crashed F4U from World War Two is on Big Navy, Guam, or which trains to take from Sagami-otsuka to get to Nikko, bicycled downhill from the base gate to Rota town, gobbled up trabancos in Jerez de la Frontera, saw the monkeys on the Rock at Gibraltar, wandered around the palace at Knossos, hiked  down to the Grotta del Turco at Montagna Spaccata and so on and on.  But I had never been to New York City or New Orleans or Chicago or the Grand Canyon or....  The only America I knew was some dumb ranch and environs in Montana that I flew to, seeing only the airports in EWR, LAX or SFO.

Phi Gamma Delta. Stupid wars.

"So," you might say, "you were a citizen of the world, at home wherever you found yourself."  Uh.... No.  What I was was a citizen of nowhere, an alien outsider wherever I went.  The perpetual one who did not belong. Ask any brat.

He had baby brats.

You might think that I am bragging to mention all these foreign places, but I'm not.  Transferring from one duty station to another was just ordinary life, and while outside the gate the world was different, inside it one Navy base was pretty much like any other, with an MWR, NEX, fast-food franchise, commissary, movie theater, base housing, office buildings, hangers or port facilities looking the same, painted the same, in Guam as Japan as Spain as Italy as Greece.  But once in a stateside civilian high school, I learned that what was normal to me was seen merely as boasting so I kept quiet.

For a while, I suffered pangs of homesickness and wished I was back aboard a Navy base in a foreign land.  Homesick for a stupid Navy base? Are you brain damaged? Get out of here! No, really, I was.  Brats will understand, not you slacker landlubbers.

So what's all this blabbering leading up to?  Not that much, just the realization that still, and I guess always, I will be alienated from the American mainstream, not quite a foreigner, maybe more like an out-of-phase American.  

There are lots of stories of the dumb things I did when I first settled in as a civilian.  At the time, they weren't dumb to me.  It was just that I didn't know the correct protocol, didn't understand what things to do and not do, how the ... well, it doesn't matter.  I almost lost my life twice because I didn't understand there were no-go zones in American cities, or that a female should not be out alone too early in the morning or too late at night even in supposedly safe areas. 

You say that doesn't matter? Of course, it did then.  I was shocked and terribly frightened. But it's in the past and I learned that in some ways and in some places, America is  no country at all. It's a land before civilization. I didn't .... It got too much for me.  It really did. So as soon as I could, although I never thought I would, and when fate stepped in, I put on a uniform and escaped. And when fate stepped in again, I took it off.

Am I complaining about my childhood and I should just put a sock in it?  Well, the latter is always good advice in any circumstance, but I'm not really complaining so much as noting and evaluating how growing up as I did has influenced who I am as an adult.  I'm not a nowhere (wo)man sitting in my nowhere land, as the song has it, but I'm familiar with the feeling.

Bottom line, when I read others' personal accounts of life in these United States I feel like a stranger in a, not strange, but unfamiliar land that I thought was my own, my native land.  It is, but the people in it are not quite mine. Or I am not quite theirs.

Santa Ana lover

When I was in southern California, I liked the nights when the Santa Ana winds blew.  The breeze was like black velvet sliding across my skin. The air was so warm and dry it felt like, walking outside, that you didn't need to wear any clothes at all.  But in the clothes you did wear, you didn't sweat, even if the temperature in that deep dark was 90 degrees.  Oh, your body would perspire but the moisture would evaporate as soon as it left your pores so it was as if you didn't.

I remember skateboarding fast down 28th Street in San Pedro one night during a late September Santa Ana with views of the harbor, all the lights of the cranes loading and unloading container ships, wearing nothing but cut-offs, a tee shirt scissored off at the midriff and chucks, the wind bouncing off the hill and houses, my hair flying behind me, my arms stretched out at my sides like wings, screeching a right turn at Pacific and coasting with the wind pushing me a dozen blocks to road's end, land's end, at the parking lot where my lime green Mustang GT convertible was, stepping off the board and flipping it up, walking to the edge of the cliff and gazing out across the sea at the lights of Avalon and Two Harbors on Catalina, the wind rushing past me. I felt if I jumped the wind would lift me up and I would soar like a kite.

But I didn't jump.  Instead, I hopped in my car, put the top down and sped north in the fast lane on the Harbor freeway, then the Glendale, towards the mountains where the gale was born, listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn, Dick Dale, Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys...musty, moldy, golden oldies from the groove yard of the past, the devil wind curling into the passenger seat beside me and caressing my cheek, kissing my ear, whispering secrets.

 

In Chandler Country

California night. The Devil's wind,
the Santa Ana, blows in from the east,
raging through the canyons like a drunk
screaming in a bar.
                              The air tastes like
a stubbed-out cigarette. But why complain?
The weather's fine as long as you don't breathe.
Just lean back on the sweat-stained furniture,
lights turned out, windows shut against the storm,
and count your blessings.
                                          Another sleepless night,
when every wrinkle in the bed sheet scratches
like a dry razor on a sunburned cheek,
when even ten-year whiskey tastes like sand,
and quiet women in the kitchen run
their fingers on the edges of a knife
and eye their husbands' necks. I wish them luck.

Tonight it seems that if I took the coins
out of my pocket and tossed them in the air
they'd stay a moment glistening like a net
slowly falling through dark water.
                                                        I remember
the headlights of the cars parked on the beach,
the narrow beams dissolving on the dark
surface of the lake, voices arguing
about the forms, the crackling radio,
the sheeted body lying on the sand,
the trawling net still damp beside it. No,
she wasn't beautiful - but at that age
when youth itself becomes a kind of beauty --
"Taking good care of your clients, Marlowe?"

Relentlessly the wind blows on. Next door
catching a scent, the dogs begin to howl.
Lean, furious, raw-eyed from the storm,
packs of coyotes come down from the hills
where there is nothing left to hunt.

"In Chandler Country" by Dana Gioia

 The Santa Ana air does not taste like a stubbed out cigarette.  It tastes like chaparral, chamise and California lilac, and I loved breathing it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dolton, Illinois

 Considering that the new pope hails from Dolton, Ill., I thought I'd repost my blog entry from May 12, 2023.  I'd thought about reposting it before when the mayor of Dolton was in the news for what I read somewhere is called being mayor while black.

Re-reading this piece and trying to imagine what it was like for the upright citizens of the suburb, I thought of a civilized people being attacked by encroaching barbarians.  Their own brave warriors were able to fend off the initial, probing attacks for a while, but eventually they were overwhelmed  and forced to flee, leaving all behind, all which the barbarians, being barbarians, could not maintain and ruined.

Anyway, here it is:

 **************************************************************************************************************************************

Happy days in Dolton

Digging through a bunch of old papers and other junk in a store room, I came across a cache of photos from my relative the news man's early days as a police beat reporter.  I've written about him before, how he never intended to get into the news business but planned to be a journeyman printer with his own shop, but because he knew how to touch type, when he was drafted, the army put him to work on a division newspaper and that, ultimately, led to a 40-year career in the news biz, mostly newspapers, but also radio and television. He got to hang out with people like Len O'Connor and Mike Royko.

Anyway, one of the stories he told me about his early days working the cop news on the south side of Chicago and the suburbs in that area was how blacks would prey on the businesses and homes of such bedroom towns as Riverdale, Dolton, South Holland, Harvey and others in that area.  These towns when he reported on them in the early 1970s were pleasant white communities enjoying a solid middle-class life thanks to all the nearby factories and steel mills that provided  employment at good wages.

Each town had its own police force, which diligently kept the peace and enforced the law.  Of course, the homeowners were peaceable and law-abiding.  It was the outsiders who raided to loot and rob who had to be guarded against.  My relative told me of how when you called the cops they responded immediately to a break-in, burglary, armed robbery, whatever it was, and they would pursue the felon no matter what until they got him. Since each town's cops only had jurisdiction in their community, they would hand off a hot pursuit of a perp to the next town's cops as the bad guy fled through them.  The Cook County Sheriff's Dept. would also join in the pursuit, as would the Illinois State Police.  He told me of several such chases in which multiple police cars were wrecked, one, in which, if memory serves, 14 police cars crashed chasing a bad guy, and another where the bad guy crashed into a gas station fuel pump, which exploded in a huge fireball.  But they did get the bad guy.  And usually alive, without gunplay.  And, he said, regarding fleeing felons, never mind what the judge would hand them, the cops would tune them up on the spot.  Only then would they face a judge.

Anyway the second, here are some photos of his that I thought were interesting illustrations of those days.  Most of the photos in his archive, if I may call it that, are just negatives, only a few prints.  So I only had a handful to select from.

This one on the left looks like a press conference with cops...I don't know.  But what interests me is the uniforms and the hair styles, and that guy in the background who looks like a Weegee-type news photog. He's even wearing a trench coat!  Note the photo of President Nixon, which fixes it in time.

The photo on the right is of a cop dusting for fingerprints after a burglary.  Thieves climbed up on the roof of the building and cut a hole in it and climbed down into the business to rob it but the alarms went off and the cops were on the bad guys like that.  Note the policeman is armed with a revolver.  Probably an old reliable Smith & Wesson .38.  And I bet should he have ever had to use it, he would have administered a pistol whipping, not emptied the cylinder.  Those times were far less shooty than today. Maybe that's because the police were more respected in those days, even by criminals, and cops had the authority and backing for what they needed to do on the spot, and were certain that any bad guys they nabbed would do hard time.

This photo on the left shows the end of one of those epic car chases, ending as they usually did with the perp crashing his stolen car, and the cops swarming him and hauling his sorry ass off to the calaboose.  It looks like a Cook County Sheriff's Department deputy and an Illinois state trooper were in on this bust.  I think the car is a Lincoln, but I'm not sure.  Usually the bad guys stole Cadillacs or Lincolns.

To the right is a photo of the Cook County Sheriff Department deputy pictured above left counting the recovered loot the robber got.  It would be cataloged and then returned to the store keeper, sometimes the very same day.  They didn't dawdle back then and the red tape was minimal.  Crook robs, cops catch, your money returned, crook goes to the slammer.  

Now this photo below is different.  It shows a neighborhood get-together in suburban Dolton in 1973.  The back of the photo says "pet parade."  I suppose it was a kind of street party where neighbors would gather with their pets and enjoy a nice time together.  I've colorized it to bring out just how pleasant and enjoyable it must have been, with lots of families, lots of children, lots of dogs -- and, you will notice, everybody is white.  It was Leave It to Beaver land for real, prosperous, safe, peaceful and pleasant.

Today, the factories and steel mills have long since closed and Dolton is more than 92 percent black and just barely 5 percent white, mostly elderly who can't afford to move. It's plagued by crime, drugs, gangs and street violence.  Here's a photo I found from a Sun-Times article about Dolton in 2022:

The photo, taken by Anthony Vazquez, shows Martin Luther King Blvd in Dolton.  The story says the suburb is like a ghost town with abandoned stores and buildings infested with druggies and the homeless.  A crime stats website describes Dolton today thusly:

"Dolton has an overall crime rate of 7,484 per 100,000 residents. This is one of the most dangerous regions in the United States. This means that your chances of becoming a victim of any type of crime in Dolton is 1 in 13 if you reside there for a year."

Dolton, Ill. Crime Rates

A couple of more end of police chase photos.  The bad guys never got away and never got far.  Too bad about those stolen Cadillacs:

 

Wer ein holdes Weib errungen

 

I flew up to Alaska to celebrate my brother's birthday with him. Considering the bad feelings Canadians have towards us Americans these days, if adverse conditions caused excessive fuel consumption, I didn't want to risk having to make a fuel stop there and deal with whatever hassle the Canuks might feel like subjecting a Yankee imperialist sky pirate to. So I flew to Seattle and gassed up there, then flew on to Juneau, cutting almost 200 miles off the over-Canada distance.  I refueled and had lunch at Juneau, then continued on to Anchorage, making it a pretty long day, almost 10 hours in the air and 480 gallons of fuel burned. 

The next morning, I flew on to Fairbanks where I landed to top off my fuel and have breakfast, then flew on to Bettles, some ways north of the Arctic Circle, and landed on the 5,200-foot gravel runway there, about three hours in the air total time. I was tireder the second day than the first. It does catch up with you.  The temperature was not a lot different from what it was in Montana, low 20s at night, mid 40s during the day, but the air smelled different, fresher somehow. Maybe it was the breeze blowing off the river.

When I was gassing up -- not that I really needed to, but I go by the old adage that the only time you have too much fuel is when you are on fire, plus full tanks preclude condensation --  a couple of guys came by to look over my plane and remarked how well I had managed to put it down on a gravel runway.  I didn't bother to tell them that our ranch runway was nowhere near as nice as this one, certainly not as wide, and also gravel.

Bettles was founded during the boom years of the North Slope oil bonanza and has been in decline ever since, the only thing going is tourism, such as it is. The place has only a few dozen permanent residents now. The airfield is bigger than the town.  I kid you not.

My brother met me, coming in from his place in a Cessna T206H float plane and off we went, flying through some spectacular scenery. The land was still just as God made it. It was easy to imagine that this was the world before Adam, and that there were no people anywhere. Gates of the Arctic was definitely a good name for the region.

For his present, I gave my brother a Ruger Hawkeye Alaskan .375 and a stack of ammunition.  Since he's had some brown bear trouble I thought it might prove useful. Carrying the rifle on my plane was another reason for not wanting to have to land in Canada. I did not want to hear that dreaded phrase, "Do you have any firearms on board?" At least not since that one time I replied, "Well, what do you need?"  Definitely the wrong answer. Those Canadians just can't take a joke.

We had a pleasant little party and spent the long evening discussing many things. It had been a long time since we had been able to just talk and talk like this.  He has always been my favorite brother, very much like me in thinking in many ways.  We both have an almost mystical, panentheistic view of life and nature and God in a way I'm not about to try to explain.  I've always envied and admired his choice of professions that has allowed him to be where he wants to be and do what he wants to do.  

His wife was five months into her pregnancy and was definitely glowing. I brought her some comfy slides with arch support.  Those slippers helped me with my last pregnancy and I knew she would get good use out of them. I wanted her to rest while I fixed supper but she insisted I sit down while she whipped up the grub, and mighty good vittles they were, too.  I asked how she was doing, being out here so far from any other people, and she said she managed. Her husband was all the company she needed. My brother said that soon he would move her down to Fairbanks for the birth where relatives would stay with her, but he had to remain in the north for his work. She said she would be just fine staying with him.  He smiled but shook his head.  He'd take her south.

My other brother is very much like my father in many ways, and followed him into a career in naval aviation. He's of a more practical, down-to-earth mindset.  I guess I am kind of in between the two of them.  I am a romantic in the Wordsworthian sense, but also have the commonsense viewpoint of the female who has to change diapers and treat boo-boos.

Picking up some ice.

They asked how my flight from Juneau to Anchorage had been and I said, aside from some turbulence, it was uneventful. That was kind of an understatement, but I mentioned Portage Pass and the weather over Prince William Sound so I needed to say no more. The NWS forecast for the Cook inlet area when I traversed it was for “moderate to locally severe turbulence with strong winds, showers and strong updrafts and downdrafts.” The winds aloft from 3,000 feet to 12,000 feet were forecast to be southeasterly to southerly (an onshore flow of moist air) at 26 knots increasing to 52 knots with altitude. Surface winds locally through passes and canyons were forecast at 45 to 60 knots. Moderate rime icing was predicted from 3,000 feet to the cloud tops at 15,000 feet. Weather observations along my route were marginal VFR (with a VNR) to IFR, except for Anchorage airport itself, which was VFR with a light northwest surface wind and a three-degree spread between the 40 degree Fahrenheit temperature and the dew point. So...you know....  My brother knew. 

Windshield icing up.

I remarked that according to all the on-line sages women are congenitally incapable of flying airplanes and if you let a woman try to fly one she'll crash it so I guessed it was just sheer luck that I made it up here.  He asked me why I read that swill or paid attention to those arrogant morons. All they want to do is stir up trouble. I shrugged and said that I was dropping out of anything to do with politics.  Best not to even know what those characters are yapping about.  He said it was about time I stopped wasting my time that way.  Then we talked about real things, things that matter.

Back at Bettles, as I was preparing to leave a couple of men approached me and asked where I was flying to.  When I said Fairbanks and points south, they asked if they could hitch a ride with me.  I hesitated -- they could hijack me easily -- and they could read my thoughts or at least sense my uneasiness so they suggested I check them out at the ranger station, which we all went to together.  At the station, a woman asked if I had room for one more and when I said I did word got out and I ended up with seven passengers,four men, a woman and her child and another woman, all of whom traveled for free.  That was the first time I ever picked up hitch-hikers in an airplane.  I wonder how often that happens in remote, lightly populated places accessible only by plane.  I dropped off the four men at Fairbanks and the two women and the child flew with me to Anchorage where I dropped off the woman and child and the other woman continued on with me to Juneau. 

She rode with me in the cockpit and I was pleased for the company.  The weather was a little better over the central coast this time, so I could relax a bit and enjoy her conversation.  

She said she had come to Alaska to work as a stripper, which paid very well in the woman-starved north, and had also gotten into prostitution, which paid even better, but quit that as it was too dangerous, many of the men in the state being very violent, even murderous.  I was only mildly surprised to learn that she had been married and her husband was her pimp.  But I was shocked when she said that one time a john began beating her up and her husband had burst into the room to stop him and they had gotten into a fight and her husband was killed.  She ran from the room and the john chased her, but she got away.  She called the police.  They booked her for prostitution but didn't bother to hunt down the john.  He was just some guy.  They noted down his description and put the word out, but that's about all they could do. 

She was going down to Juneau to work the tourist trade, she said.  That didn't sound like she had given up prostitution, but I didn't pursue it.  I also wondered what she was doing in Bettles but I didn't ask.

We did discuss male sexual proclivities, of which she was a storehouse of information, some of it hilarious, a lot more alarming.  She warned me never to get involved with an Alaska native man.  They raped their own daughters routinely, beat their wives and often killed them.  They treated their dogs better than any woman.  I said that reminded me of the men in Afghanistan, except the hajis preferred boys to girls and treated their goats better than their women. Had sex more often with them, too.  She asked if that was really true and I assured it was indeed very true. 

When we hit turbulence, she was blasé about it and continued talking, clearly an experienced bush plane passenger. Looking me over appraisingly, she said if I ever wanted a job stripping I could make bank, especially as a blonde with milk monsters. I could have said something about that.

She said when she first got to Alaska she was dead broke.  She had hitch-hiked up the Alcan, riding mostly with truckers, paying them with blowjobs.  She was stranded in Tok for a week before she got a ride, this time with a family in their RV.  When they camped for the night, while the wife was preparing dinner she sucked off the husband. 

They dropped her off in Fairbanks. She had not even enough money to buy a meal, but she found a strip joint, got hired right away and made enough money that night to get a motel room, buy dinner and breakfast the next morning and go shopping for some clothes.  By the end of the week she had enough money to buy a second hand car and the week after rent an apartment.  I gathered she lived in Anchorage now, where she owned a house and had a boyfriend who worked construction and on fishing boats. I asked if she still stripped and she said yes.  I asked if she provided any special services to her customers and she said now mostly hand jobs and dry humps. 

When we got to Juneau, she invited me to spend the evening hanging out with her. She knew some guys who liked my type and I was a little tempted.  It would be interesting to see what her world was like.  But I decided that would not be wise.  I explained to her that I needed to get home to my kids and my husband and she said that sounded boring so why not have a girls' weekend with her before going back to the dull routine? She could introduce me to a lot of fun guys who were free with their money. She was pretty insistent about it, so I finally said I was on a schedule and I had to stick to it or I would get in trouble. I needed to get going.

I had actually planned to stay over in Juneau, but I didn't want to chance running into her or her pals if I went out to look over the town and have dinner. As I thought about it, it seemed curious that after telling me how dangerous Alaskan men could be she wanted me to come with her to meet several.  What was up with that? It also struck me as odd that she never once showed any interest in what I was doing in Alaska, why I had come to Bettles, how I came to be piloting a fairly large airplane. Her whole conversation was about herself and the money to be made off men, almost as if she were trying to sell me. 

Of course, I could be just letting my imagination run away with me.  She might have even been intimidated, if that's the right word, by me, someone with a professional-grade skill and occupation, as she may have assumed, while she was...well, what she was and she wanted to show to me that she had a good job, too, one that made her a lot of money.  I don't know. Maybe she just wanted a friend. Maybe I missed a fun evening.  And maybe I avoided being sex trafficked.  Who knows?

Anyway, so, tired as I was after busting through the leg from ANC to JNU, I refueled and took off for Seattle.  I put on my oxygen mask and snorted the pure stuff whenever I felt my eyes grow heavy. I put the plane on autopilot as I usually did not do, as I've mentioned before, in case I dozed off --which I didn't do.  With night, there was nothing but the glow of the instruments, the drone of the engines, some radio chatter, and the stars racing between clouds. I kept my scan going and kept up my dead reckoning plot to match with my GPS track. My mind drifted free, the time passed.

When I finally chirped the tires at BFI, I had been in the air for some 14 hours total that day.  I felt like I had gone from God's own heimat to an encounter with one of the denizens  of a Henry Miller novel to normal earth.  I thought about gassing up and getting on home but I knew I was just too tired to even try. It completely exhausted me just to handle the details of getting my plane serviced and find accommodations. 

When  I got to the hotel, I was so tired that I fell asleep flopped across the bed fully clothed and slept until dawn, got up, took a shower and went back to bed. I woke up a couple of hours later and went out to the airport.  I hadn't eaten dinner so I was ready for breakfast but I couldn't find anything open. At my plane, I got out my stash of emergency MREs, selected cheese tortellini with assorted crap, wolfed it down and was good to go. I leaped into the sky and pointed old Betsy's nose into the eastern sun. About two and a half hours later I touched down on home ground.  As I sat in the cockpit after pulling the throttles to idle cut-off I nodded off and didn't wake up until Jeff, a concerned look on his face, touched my shoulder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Same time, same station

 

In by-gone days, the old, weird America produced a variety of radio plays featuring protagonists with out-of-the mainstream professions.  In this play, the narrator is a free-lance insurance investigator, the story told through entries in his expense account.  He is hired to locate the beneficiary of a $1,500 life insurance policy (about $18,000 in 2025). Not much to make a story out of? You might believe so.  But you would be wrong.  This is well worth your time to listen to, as you live life in these United States as it was 70 years gone by.

The writer and novelist Colin Fleming has written about this play, "At one point, Dollar is so ground down emotionally by what he's learning about this person--and, via her, what he's learning about humanity, that he begs off the case." Don't you.

 "The Broderick Matter," a Johnny Dollar radio play first broadcast over CBS radio the week of November 14~18, 1955. All five 15-minute episodes:

Bob Bailey, the actor who portrays Johnny Dollar, was very much a part of the old, weird America.  His Midwestern parents owned a stock company and he first appeared on stage when he was 10 days old.  He began regular acting at the age of four. He never attended school, picking up what education he needed along the way. He ran away with a carnival when he was 15, working as a barker --"Step right this way to see the tattooed lady! (she'd be out of work today)."  "Yes, ladies and gentlemen, one thin dime will reveal to you the secret arts of seduction of the fabled Orient!"  

From there he got into radio with his mother's help; she had switched from stock company acting to the new medium almost as soon as broadcasting became a thing (as we say today).  Bailey became a regular on The Chicago Theater of the Air, first broadcast by WGN and later carried nationally over the Mutual Broadcasting System. It was hosted by "Colonel" Robert McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune, staunch America Firster, and foe of Franklin Roosevelt. The Theater produced operettas and serious dramas, airing from the Medinah Temple at 600 N. Wabash Ave., performed in front of packed crowds, its 5,000 seats sold out every week for 14 years, 1940 to 1954.

 It may seem odd that an unschooled Ohio kid could have a successful career starring in operettas and that operettas were wildly popular among the national radio listening audience.  But such he had and such they were. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What's really important to me

 "Whether I was sewing, working in the garden, cooking, milking, tending my chickens, or helping the children hoe, my mind was always with them. And watching them at times like that gave me a thrill. They were my flower garden in my hard years of toil and loneliness. As each child was born it was a flower added to my garden, each a new kind, each needing different care."
~ Mary Mann Hamilton, Trials of the Earth

 In raising my children, I think back -- or try to -- to when I was a child and how I was every day, what I liked, didn't like, how I felt, what I wanted to do, what I didn't, what I liked to eat and didn't like, what were the frightening and unpleasant things for me, the happy and enjoyable, and then try to think how my parents fit into all that, my mother, my father, then see how I can use those memories in helping my children.

My parents roles and influence were very different, my dad being away a lot at sea or off on some TAD.  During the Gulf War he was gone for 11 months, so my mom was in charge of the household and had to handle everything, including us kids, by herself.

Almost every summer I got bundled off to my grandparents at the ranch starting when I was eight.  My brothers also came, sometimes, but being older usually had something else to do, go to Boy Scout camp at some exciting place -- to me it seemed exciting anyway -- like Emerald Bay on Catalina Island, where they learned to sail and snorkel, get lifeguard certified and all kinds of cool things.  But at the ranch I had my own horse and learned how to take care of her and other animals. 

My grandfather and his friend, a retired search and rescue expert, taught me how to track, which I found fascinating. What I remember most about that is that I had to go barefoot while tracking.  That made me watch carefully where I stepped, looking down at where I placed my feet.  Doing that, I noticed what I otherwise would not have -- all the little details, insects, scat, disturbed pebbles and twigs, a grass blade pressed into the earth....  I also learned to look behind me frequently, not only to remember the way back, but also because an animal that realizes it is being tracked will circle around behind the tracker and keep an eye on him (or her). 

My grandfather would step on a blade of grass or a dandelion and have me not merely look at it but study it so I could remember how it looked freshly stepped on.  Then an hour later he would have me do the same thing, then two hours later...then the next day, the day after...the next week.  When I could tell him with certainty how many hours or days had passed since the blade of grass, plant, leaf or flower had been stepped on, he had me do it in increments of minutes.  You think that can't be done? It can.  He taught me to do the same thing with scratches on tree bark, broken twigs, disturbed pebbles, footprints in soil and mud, with scat (animal feces).

I learned that if you are looking for deer, don't look for the body, which may blend in to the surroundings, but look for the ears.  Not only do they stand out but they move.  Sooner or later they move and then you will spot them. 

I learned that any animal, human included, on a still day has a scent hemisphere about 30 feet in radius.  Any animal that comes within 30 feet of you will become aware of you.  But it will ignore you if you don't behave in an aggressive manner -- that includes looking directly at it: only predators stare at other animals. There are things you can do to conceal your scent, the most effective being to smear yourself with the feces of another animal. Coating yourself with mud also works, though not as well. My grandmother put her foot down on me doing that.  Thanks, grandma!

One useful practice I gained from that training was to mark my footwear in some distinctive way, cut a notch in the soles or something, and tell others so that if I became lost and rescuers were searching for me, when they found a footprint they could immediately know whether it was mine or not.  All my family's footwear is so identified now.

My grandfather also taught me how to shoot, which I learned to do well, but which I did not like and had no interest in, but learned because I wanted not to disappoint him.  He was a stern man and I was a little afraid of him and I didn't want to make him cross with me. So when he threw an old tobacco can in the air and told me to shoot the head off Prince Albert, I raised my single-shot Ithaca .22 and knocked it out of the sky.

Relic of the old weird America. Guess what No. 10 is.

Remembering these episodes, I am happy to teach my kids things they obviously have interest in, but I am torn about teaching them things they are not.  Should, for example, I teach, or have el jefe teach, my mini-me how to shoot?  As I was, so is she: she has no interest in guns or shooting, but might she not someday need to be able to effectively handle firearms for her own protection? I remember reading about a little girl being taught to shoot at a firing range and accidentally shooting and killing her instructor.  I can imagine, although I have no idea if it's true, that an eager father pushed a reluctant child into...well, no need to speculate.  I'll let the gun thing go, for now. I do wish that we lived in a civilized society where no one ever needed to take a thought about guns.

As it is, we teach as things come up. Children are naturally curious about  pretty rocks, clouds, flowers and trees and all the wild things flying buzzing, hopping and grazing they see. So without effort they are introduced to botany, zoology and geology. These lead not only to general sciences like evolution, meteorology and climatology but more practical sciences such as pedology, animal husbandry and assorted agricultural practices. These sciences are taught naturally during the day as we carry out routine activities, take walks and horseback rides, find interesting rocks and curious plants, hear different bird songs, see frogs and newts, fish and crawdads in streams, find intriguing animal trails and spoor. 

Children love to hear stories and have things explained to them on the spot: "Mom! Look! Look! What is this shiny red rock with these white circles in it?" "Dad, is this an arrowhead?  Can you teach me to make a bow and arrow and can I use this as the point?  What kind of wood should I use for the bow? Should I use a different wood for the arrow shaft?  How can I tell those trees apart and where should I look for them?  Why are there different trees anyway? How did the Indians make bowstrings without string? What...."

Finding a fossil leads to paleontology and the coolest thing of all for little boys -- dinosaurs!

Helping Dad build a doghouse for Fido or a playhouse for them, they not only learn carpentry and a bit about architecture, but geometry and the practical value of numbers in such things as accurate measurement, calculating area, angles and so forth.  And, of course, how to use tools safely and select the correct ones for each job.

Being around animals and observing the practices of selective breeding they learn about sex in a matter-of-fact way and what it is for -- producing the next generation. They see and we help them understand the differences in behavior between males and females. They also learn the value of creating offspring with a high genetic-value partner, and the troubles that come from bad mate selection.  We practice eugenics with our livestock, as do all stockmen; if we didn't, we'd be out of business.  We buy and sell sperm from high quality sires as a matter of course. They see the results. We point out that we breed the traits that are useful to us, not the animal; in fact some traits we breed for would result in the animal's death in the wild, and the animal has no say in how we breed it. 

When they ask about the applicability of eugenics to people, we discuss the ramifications, speculate about a world ruled by eugenics and who would determine what traits were eugenic. We speculate on breeding humans for specific uses, like insects in an ant colony, and are we not now haphazardly doing it? That leads us to both literature and history. History inevitably leads to warfare, especially warfare before what we call civilization -- societies organized around agriculture, controlled by a literate elite -- when invading tribes would exterminate all the males of the conquered, but keep the desirable, breedable females.  That leads to archaeology and anthropology....

Cuts and scrapes and more serious injuries both to themselves and their animal friends lead to not only learning first aid but about germs and infection, the immune system and other aspects of the body.

 So just by going about their day-to-day activities, our children are becoming very well educated. Of course, they have periods of formal study, the self-disciple and persistence required to master complex subjects being an important part of a person's education.  They need to learn to focus on the goal and not the boring, tiresome early stages of acquiring a skill that in future years they will find useful, remunerative or simply enjoyable.