Good Morning All & Happy Grandparents Day!
Here’s to all you grandparents out there! Today is your special day of celebration! What would the world be like without grandparents? While my grandfathers had died before I had the chance to get to know them, I had the pleasure of knowing both of my grandmothers and they were special to me, each in their own way. One of my fondest memories of my father’s mother, Grandma Ida, was of her firing up the wood stove in the kitchen at her home in East Raymond, Washington and helping her collect eggs from her chicken coop; and one of my fondest memories of my mother’s mother, Grandma Testerman (Tempa) was of her inviting our family over for Sunday dinner and fixing mouth-watering pan-fried chicken, with biscuits & white gravy and well cooked green beans, a typical Oklahoma style Sunday dinner. What are your fondest memories of your grandparents? With all of the advances in medicine, more and more of us are living longer to be able to see our great grandchildren. How about that? I sure do enjoy being a grandparent myself!
Speaking of grandparents, did you know that one of our early presidents, John Tyler, who was born in 1790, has two living grandchildren? Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr., who is 96 and Harrison Ruffin Tyler, who is 92. Wow!!!
I’m always interested in how Grandparent nicknames come to be…For example, my Dad, Don Newbold, became “Pumpa” when our firstborn and the first grandchild in our immediate family, Andrea (Andy), couldn’t say Grandpa, but could say “Pumpa” and so “Pumpa” it was and my Dad loved his Grandparent “nickname.” I’m “Papa-a” to my grandkids. I suggested that nickname after having visited the Cook Islands and asked one of the native Cook Islanders what they called grandfathers there, to which they responded “Papa” and then proceeded to explain that they call old white men there a “Papa ‘a”, meaning “old white man.” So I thought that would be an appropriate nickname for me. One of my favorite grandparent nicknames in our extended family is “CeCe” for my daughter-in-law Sarah’s mother, Celeste, the grandmother of our my grandson Izaak (Ike). Grandparent nicknames are such fun, don’t you think? I just read an article that shared some grandparent nicknames for celebrities. Here are a few for your reading enjoyment:
Martin Sheen: “Peach”
Sharon Osborne: “Shazza”
Naomi Judd: “Mamaw”
Goldie Hawn: “Glam-Ma” & “GoGo”
Happy Birthday today to friend LuRae, wife &mother of two of the finest women volleyball players I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching in person, among many other talents! Here’s to you on your special day of celebration! Enjoy! And here’s to actress Barbara Bain of “Mission Impossible” T.V. fame, who turns 89 today! She and a co-star from that 1960s T.V. series, Martin Landau, made a stylish and photogenic couple. Some of the “beautiful people” from that era, for sure! Happy Birthday wishes also goes to track star & Olympics champion Michael Johnson (who can ever forget his gold track shoes!), who is 53 today! Here’s to all of you!
It sure is smoky in Spokane today, and just about everywhere else in the West, it seems. We sure struggle with massive wildfires now. It seems to me that we need to do a better job of managing our forests & woodland areas through selective thinning and removal of fuels (brush, slag, etc.) from the bottomlands. Those would be practical steps to help reduce the impact of wildfires. No doubt global warming is a factor, but there are some common sense measures that federal, state & local governments can do to reduce the threat and minimize the damage inflicted by these fires. We all just need to do a better job of being stewards of God’s Creation. The massive wildfires we are experiencing now should be a wake up call for us to “step up our game” in that regard. What do you think?
Another thing we need to do a better job of is paying attention to the lessons of History. Here’s an excerpt for Wilfred McClay’s essay entitled “Rediscovering the Wisdom in American History” that is compelling in this regard:
“A related lesson of history is that acts of statesmanship often require courage and imagination, even daring, especially when the outcome seems doubtful. Take the case of (Abraham) Lincoln. So accustomed are we to thinking of Lincoln in heroic terms that we forget the depth and breadth of his unpopularity during his entire time in office. Few great leaders have been more comprehensively disdained, loathed, and underestimated. A low Southern view of him, of course, was to be expected, but it was widely shared in the North as well. As Lincoln biographer David Donald put it, “Lincoln’s own associates thought him “a Simple Susan, a baboon, an aimless punster, a smutty joker.” Abolitionist Wendell Phillips called him a “huckster in politics, a first-rate, second-rate man.” George McClellan, his opponent in the 1864 election, openly disdained him as a “well-meaning baboon.” For much of that election year, Lincoln was convinced, with good reason, that he was doomed to lose the election, with incalculable consequences for the war effort and the future of the nation…”
“…We need to remember that this is generally how history happens. It is not like a Hollywood movie in which the background music swells and the crowd in the room applauds and leaps to its feet as the orator dispenses timeless words, and the camera pans the room full of smiling faces. In real history, the background music does not swell, the trumpets do not sound, and the carping critics often seem louder than the applause. The leader or the soldier has to wonder whether he is acting in vain, whether the criticisms of others are in fact true, whether time will judge him harshly, whether his sacrifice will count for anything. Few leaders have felt this burden more completely than Lincoln…”
I came across another card from my 1960s collectible card collection. This one featured the “MGM-1 Matador” guided missile. It was the first operational surface-to-surface cruise missile designed and built by the U.S.. It was developed after World War II by the Glenn L. Martin Company, drawing from plans of the German V-1 rocket/missile that was used by Germany at the end of the war. It was similar in concept to the V-1, but it included a radio command that allowed in-flight course corrections. This allowed accuracy to be maintained over greatly extended ranges of just under 1,000 kilometers. The “Matador” was powered by a small turbojet engine. The description of the “Matador” on my collectible card said that “With no need of a runway, the Matador is easily transported from place to place, presenting a hard-to-find weapon of destruction. This swept-wing missile can be trucked and launched from the same vehicle, close to any enemy. It’s rocket assist take-off sends it into the skies where the jet engine takes over. It destroys its target electronically, as it has a brain of its own…” The missile was capable of carrying a 2,000-pound conventional warhead, but it is unknown if any of these were actually deployed. By the late 1950 at least, all Matadors carried a nuclear warhead. As with all missiles and bombers of that time, accuracy was not good in today’s terms. Anything within a mile was considered a hit. Even though the missile was classified as a “tactical” weapon, in fact it was not technically capable of hitting individual targets, so it was likely targeted at cities near which a military installation such as an airfield existed. The last Matadors were removed from active service in 1962, with a total of 1,200 missiles produced…
Here is the trivia fact for the day:
Q: Where can you find the world’s highest-altitude ATM…Nepal, Peru, Pakistan or Cyprus?
A: Need some cash at the top of the world? You’re in luck if you happen to be Khunjerab Pass in Pakistan, near the border with China. As a way of demonstrating their technical skills, the National Bank of Pakistan installed an ATM at 15,397 feet above sea level there in 2016—which earned it a Guinness World Record for “highest altitude automated teller machine.” The ATM is solar-powered, so there’s no worry about electricity. Not only does the ATM dispense cash (mostly to tourists), you can even pay bills there!
Here is the word definition for the day:
“Grok”: A 1960s American English word meaning “Understand (something) intuitively or by empathy” or “Empathize or communicate sympathetically; establish a rapport.” Wouldn’t it be grand if more of us would want to “grok”with one another?
Here is the thought for the day:
“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. he intends to come and live in it Himself.”
C.S. Lewis, “Mere Christianity”, as quoted in “C.S. Lewis’ Little Book Of Wisdom: Meditations on Faith, Life, Love and Literature” (2018)
Here’s to a great Sunday and lots of love and good wishes always…stay safe, stay strong!
Press on,
Papa ‘a (Dad, Uncle Mark, Mark, etc.)