The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Fourth of July and the Partriotic Return of the Big Yellow Button

Posted on | July 2, 2022 | Comments Off on The Fourth of July and the Partriotic Return of the Big Yellow Button

 

LITHIA SPRINGS, GEORGIA
My family and I are gathered here this Saturday for the funeral of my Aunt Pat, one of the finest Southern ladies you can imagine, and I have been asked to speak a brief eulogy at the service. My brother and I rode down with my son Jim at the wheel, while my wife flew to Florida with daughter Reagan so that they could ride up with my oldest daughter Kennedy and Kennedy’s two young sons. We’re staying in a nice hotel on Thornton Road, now a bustling commercial thoroughfare, but I was telling Jim I can remember when this was a dirt road, as were many other roads in Douglas County when I was growing up here.

Memories are of course appropriate when you’re preparing for a memorial service, and one of the things I’m going to be telling the folks at the service today is that my Aunt Pat worked in the aerospace industry. She got married at age 17 and was a mother of three young children before she was 30, when she got a home-study course and began teaching herself shorthand, which qualified her to get hired as an executive secretary at the Lockheed Aircraft plant in Marietta (now Lockheed-Martin). When you describe someone as “working in the aerospace industry,” a secretary might not be the first job that comes to mind, but it takes a lot of people doing all kinds of jobs to make all those planes. My Dad spent 37 years working at Lockheed, mainly as a dispatcher on the C-130 flight line, and it’s always a moment of pride for me whenever I see the C-130 in action — the greatest cargo airplane in the world, and my Dad helped make it. Speaking of patriotic pride . . .

Monday is the Fourth of July, and we’ll be back home in time to shoot our annual family show in West Virginia, which isn’t going to be as big as some previous years, simply because my son Jim (my main accomplice in our pyrotechnic adventures) has been very busy the past year, and we don’t have quite as many fireworks as usual.

We hope to augment this small stash on our return journey home, which is why I’ve brought back the Big Yellow Button. Even though the PayPal contribution button is always on the page, sometimes I enlarge it for the benefit of near-sighted readers who may not have noticed it before.

 

Our usual request for tip-jar hits is $17.76. A 1,400-mile road trip is quite expensive under Bidenflation, so if you want to chip in $5 for a gallon of gas, that would be appreciated. Of course, on the Fourth of July weekend, you might want to pay tribute to such great American patriots as Andrew Jackson or even Benjamin Franklin, IYKWIMAITYD.

Helping defray travel expenses — God only knows how much we paid for two hotel rooms, because I was afraid to ask my wife, who booked it — and also maybe adding some extra fireworks to our Fourth of July are surely worthy causes, but as always the main thing is, keeping my wife happy. She likes it when the blog actually produces revenue, and keeping her happy is always Job One, so it’s once again my duty to ask readers to recall the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!




 

Category: Family, Shoe Leather Fund

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