You may not recognize that teenager from New Mexico who, in 1981, posed for Oui magazine, and she hadn’t crossed my mind in many years until I saw this headline today:
Well, you’ve posed in a lot less than that, Demi, but I suppose most would still prefer the 1981 version, given the choice. Of course, there has been some change in fashion in the past 40 years and — how shall I say this? — the topiary might require substantial trimming to suit 21st-century tastes, but I’m sure a plebiscite would still return a landslide majority in favor of 18-year-old Demi, despite the excessive shrubbery.
Her career and love life have been equally disappointing, a failure to make the most of her many opportunities. Demi Guynes took as her show business surname that of her first husband, a recently divorced rock musician 12 years her senior whom she married not long after arriving in Hollywood as a teenager. She filed for divorce from Freddy Moore in 1984, after she had landed two seasons on the soap opera General Hospital and her earliest film roles. One of those film parts was in the unspeakably wretched Blame It On Rio, the plot of which would be enough to end the career of anyone who dared produce such a film nowadays. A few years ago I happened to see it while surfing cable and, well, if the adjective “cringeworthy” had not previously been coined, Blame It On Rio would be sufficient inspiration.
Michelle Johnson, just 18 when Blame It On Rio was filmed, was quite lovely, but as the love interest of Michael Caine, then age 50? Even by the depraved standards of Hollywood, this was unusually perverse. Frankly, I’d forgotten that Demi Moore was part of the cast until that headline about her posing in a swimsuit at age 59 sparked my research. Someone should ask how her opinion about “this idea that we become less desirable as we get older” might be contextualized by reference to the creepy plot of Blame It On Rio. But I digress . . .
Demi next starred in St. Elmo’s Fire, arguably the most ambitious of the so-called “brat pack” movies of the 1980s. While I’ve forgotten the plot of St. Elmo’s Fire, I recall the wonderful cinematography, where the scenes always seemed to be filmed in “the golden hour” with Washington, D.C., as the backdrop. She followed that with the popular romantic comedy About Last Night and, at age 24, was well on her way to success as a leading lady. A year later, she married Bruce Willis, and the couple had three daughters together, during a period when both of their careers were peaking, he with Die Hard and its sequels, she with Ghost and A Few Good Men. But while Bruce’s career continued to yield hits (Armageddon in 1998, The Sixth Sense in 1999), things weren’t so good for Demi. G.I. Jane was awful and a total bomb at the box office, from which she never really recovered. She has kept working steadily, but she ceased to be a marquee name. And what’s with the swimsuit photos as an argument against being “less desirable” at 59? Desirable to whom?
Oh, yeah — she divorced Bruce Willis (or he divorced her) and then “Moore had a three-year relationship with martial arts instructor Oliver Whitcomb” and subsequently “began dating actor Ashton Kutcher, who is 15 years her junior.” Did that relationship ever make any sense at all? It lasted about eight years, the divorce being finalized in 2013, when Demi was 51 and Kutcher was 36. Now he’s married to Mila Kunis with two kids, while his elderly ex-wife Demi is posing in swimsuits to prove she’s still “desirable.” Never made sense to me why she split with Bruce Willis, but I suppose when people burn bridges like that, they have fond hopes of a better road ahead. Demi was in her mid-30s when she divorced Bruce, and her trajectory to that point had been entirely upward, so the possibility of a “less desirable” future was beyond her imagination.
That’s my son Jim, rigging the last fuse on our Fourth of July fireworks finale. We planned the show on very short notice — driving back from Georgia after attending my Aunt Pat’s memorial service Saturday — and were adding to the show as late as six o’clock Monday afternoon, when Jim sent me to Pyro Dudes to grab another 48 shells and 40 feet of extra fuse for the finale. Unlike previous years, when we bought cases of fireworks wholesale, this year’s supply was purchased retail, mostly from our friends at Pyro Dudes, who have excellent prices and discounts.
We have been doing this since the boys were little, and I regret that only Jim was able to be involved in this year’s show. Bob and his wife are in Alaska now, Jefferson is in a certain Midwestern state, where he will begin law school this fall, and Emerson is in Spain with his wife. Meanwhile, my wife and our youngest daughter Reagan are in Florida with our oldest daughter Kennedy, so that left just Jim and me to carry on the patriotic family tradition of shooting off beaucoup fireworks on the Fourth of July. My brother Kirby was there, and kicked in $50 to help fund the show. We had a couple of slight timing issues with the fuses, although this did not detract from the overall awesomeness of the display and, most importantly, everything detonated safely.
After nearly 20 years, we kind of take safety for granted, because the way we fuse things together, nobody is actually in vicinity of danger when the stuff goes off. We have occasionally had a shell blow up in the tube, and a couple of times we had cakes that tipped sideways, but nothing that would endanger spectators. Other people, however . . .
That video has gotten 37 million views on Twitter, and is a perfect example of how not to shoot fireworks safely. The first error is proximity. You don’t want your spectators to be sitting right next to where the fireworks are going off. Considering that aerial shells can travel 150 feet or more up in the air, what happens if one goes sideways? So, yes, a setback of at least 50 yards between fireworks and spectators is advised.
Their second error — and this is actually rather common, although not often so disastrous — is that they were shooting off fireworks within just a few yards of their stash. The result speaks for itself, in terms of why this is not advisable. One spark goes into your fireworks stash and BOOM!
Meanwhile, 911 dispatchers across America were plagued by “Karens”:
It’s become an annual ritual — every Fourth of July, patriotic Americans celebrate with fireworks, and the neighborhood Karen calls 911. This is generally the same person who votes for politicians who want to tax and regulate everything. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Karens were demanding vaccine mandates. No doubt their ancestors were grumbling about those hooligans that threw the tea in Boston Harbor.
The Roman poet Ovid said, “If you want to be loved, be lovable.” And I think everyone who knew Pat Huber would agree that she was a very lovable person. She was kind, she was generous and courteous, she was cheerful and optimistic. A smile was her natural expression, and she was capable of laughing even amid sorrow and hardship.
When I spoke to Trish about what I should say today, I mentioned that Aunt Pat reminded me of Melanie Wilkes in Gone With the Wind, the epitome of a gracious old-fashioned Southern lady. Like Miss Melanie, Aunt Pat never had a bad word for anyone and lived up to that ancient maxim of good manners, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing all.”
Trish laughed when she said her mother tried to raise her and Deborah to be nice Southern ladies, but perhaps not with as much success as she’d hoped. For me as a boy, a visit to Aunt Pat’s was always a pleasure, going over to play with my cousin Mark, and begging to spend the night. I was a rambunctious chatterbox of a boy, and I got on people’s nerves, but Aunt Pat was always so sweet to me. Then one Saturday morning after I’d spent the night, Mark and I were playing when he was supposed to be doing his chores. She chewed him out real good, and I was shocked: I had never in my whole life seen Aunt Pat angry.
Aunt Pat was the last living member of my parent’s generation. She was born on a farm in Randolph County, Alabama, in 1933, the second of three sisters born to Hermit and Eucal Kirby. My mother Frances McCain was the oldest of the Kirby girls and Aunt Barbara Ellis was the youngest. A sociologist might observe that there was a tendency toward matrilineal affiliation in this family. For example, we always attended the Fincher Clan reunion at Big Springs, an association owed to the fact that Grandma Kirby’s mother was a Fincher. And at holidays in my youth, the gathering was always of the three Kirby sisters and their children.
A mother is the heart of a home, and because my own mother died when I was 16, I have a deep appreciation for the maternal qualities in which Aunt Pat excelled. I was always welcome at her home, and any time I’d visit, she’d insist I stay for dinner. When I had first started dating Lou Ann, I took her down to meet my Dad and brothers, and then I took her to meet Aunt Pat. Lou Ann said it was after meeting Aunt Pat that she decided to marry me, so certainly I owe her that debt of gratitude.
Aunt Pat’s two-storey home on Pleasant Drive was the closest thing to a mansion in our family, and a symbol of how far hard work can take you in life. That a girl who grew up in rural Alabama during the Depression could live in such a fine home is truly the American Dream. And I think some of Aunt Pat’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren have no idea what her life was like growing up. Trish and Deborah and the rest of us in our generation grew up hearing stories of what life was like back then in those days of dirt roads and Franklin Roosevelt. “Y’all kids don’t know how good you’ve got it,” our parents would say. “When I was a kid …” And then we’d hear a tale of shocking hardship. Our parents had to walk five miles to school – uphill both ways! Barefoot! In the snow! Or so we were expected to believe. We can laugh about it now, but the hardship of life back then was very real. Poverty was so widespread in rural Alabama in the 1930s that it was more or less universal. Aunt Pat would say, “We didn’t know we were poor – everybody was poor!”
The Kirby family actually wasn’t as poor as some of their neighbors. Grandpa Kirby was a very hard-working man, and when World War II came along, he got a job working in the shipyards in Brunswick, Georgia. Grandma Kirby joined him there, working in the canteen that served meals to the shipyard workers. They left their daughters in the care of Grandma Kirby’s parents on the farm in Alabama, so that Aunt Pat was largely raised by her grandparents, Elisha and Maude Moses. Aunt Pat and her sisters knew the value of hard work, and they knew the importance of family. We take care of our own.
As a teenager, slender young blonde Pat Kirby caught the eye of a dark-haired fellow from LaGrange named Ervin Huber. He was a cotton mill worker, three years older than Aunt Pat, and rode a motorcycle. Try to picture 20-year-old Ervin Huber roaring around on a motorcycle in 1950, and then imagine what a reaction that caused for the parents of a nice Baptist girl from Randolph County girl. Love conquers all, however, and Grandma Kirby gave her consent to the marriage on one condition, that Pat graduate from Randolph County High School before the wedding.
Ervin and Pat Huber were married for 42 years until his death in 1992. I’ve often thought of how remarkable Uncle Ervin’s career was. After they moved to Atlanta, while Ervin was working in the mill there, he took a home-study course in electronics, and got hired by Rich’s. For most of my childhood, he worked at Rich’s repairing household appliances. For the benefit of you younger folks, I have to explain that Rich’s was THE department store chain in Atlanta for decades, and the big Rich’s store downtown was THE place to shop. So when Deborah, Trish and Mark were growing up, they were always fashionably attired, because of Uncle Ervin’s employee discount at Rich’s. I also have to explain to young people that, once upon a time, when you bought an appliance or any kind of what we’d nowadays call “consumer electronics,” the store that sold it to you would repair it if it wasn’t working. Something folks used to call “customer service.” Anyway, as I say, for many years, that was Ervin’s main job, repairing radios and toasters and whatever other kind of electrical things anybody bought from Rich’s. Over the years, however, his job description changed. In the 1970s, Rich’s became part of the nationwide Federated department Store chain. Computerized cash registers and automated inventory became standard retail practice, and Ervin’s skills made him the natural choice to take over this work, so that eventually he became basically the IT chief of the whole Federated chain – very impressive for a small-town boy with a high school diploma.
Meanwhile, Aunt Pat – the girl who grew up on a farm in Randolph County – gave birth to her first two children before she was 21. She took a home-study course and taught herself shorthand, and eventually went to work in the aerospace industry. Now, when I say she worked in the aerospace industry, she was an executive secretary at the Lockheed plant in Marietta. It takes a lot of people doing a lot of different jobs to run a major company like that, so when I say Aunt Pat was part of the aerospace industry, by God, it’s the truth. She spent about 30 years at Lockheed, which is now Lockheed-Martin. My Dad worked there for 37 years, and whenever you see a C-130 cargo plane, that’s something we can be proud of – Lockheed made the greatest cargo plane the world has ever known. Folks talk about the “military-industrial complex” like it’s some kind of awful thing and I tell ‘em, buddy, the military-industrial complex put food on my table when I was a kid. Those jobs are good jobs, and Aunt Pat had every reason to take pride in working for Lockheed.
All of her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren ought to be proud to be part of Pat Huber’s legacy, just as I know she was always so proud of y’all. You are the descendants of a wonderful Southern lady, who was also a very devout and prayerful Christian. Her grandson Chris is an ordained minister, and I checked with Trish to make sure I wouldn’t be stealing from his sermon when I close this tribute by quoting from a famous passage of Proverbs 31:
“Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. … Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come. She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness. She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness. Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.”
Those of us who were blessed to know Pat Huber have reason to thank God for that blessing. We should cherish her memory forever, and each of us should strive to emulate her example.
This headline appeared Friday in the Columbus Dispatch:
As Ohio restricts abortions, 10-year-old
girl travels to Indiana for procedure
On Monday three days after the Supreme Court issued its groundbreaking decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, took a call from a colleague, a child abuse doctor in Ohio.
Hours after the Supreme Court action, the Buckeye state had outlawed any abortion after six weeks. Now this doctor had a 10-year-old patient in the office who was six weeks and three days pregnant.
Could Bernard help? . . .
Even if you’re willing to take Dr. Caitlin Bernard’s word for the basic claim — while some 10-year-olds are physically capable of getting pregnant, such cases are very rare — you’ve left the reader knowing nothing about the most basic elements of the story: What Ohio city did this happen in? Do authorities have a suspect in custody? Or is the public still in danger from the child rapist responsible for this atrocity?
The extreme youth of the alleged victim is what made the headline so shocking, and I actually checked the National Institutes of Health to make sure I wasn’t alone in finding this highly unusual. The median age of menarche (i.e., onset of menstruation, generally taken as meaning when a female becomes physically capable of pregnancy) in the United States is 11.9, about three months earlier than in the 1990s. About 10% of females reach menarche by age 10. Precocious puberty is slightly correlated with earlier sexual activity — the median age of first intercourse is 15.4 for girls reaching menache by age 10, compared to 16.6 for girls reaching menarche at age 14 or older. In general, blacks and Hispanics reach menarche earlier than white girls, but the differences are not dramatic.
Still, a 10-year-old girl getting pregnant is rare enough in the United States that I had difficulty finding any statistical data on the phenomenon. When you’re talking about something with far less than a 1% probability, good luck finding reliable data. What I was able to find was a 2008 NBC News story reporting that only 17.4% of U.S. abortions involved women under 20. So what were the chances, really, that Dr. Bernard’s Indianapolis clinic would be dealing with the case of a pregnant 10-year-old from Ohio at the very time that the Supreme Court’s ruling made this case relevant to Ohio’s abortion laws?
I don’t trust this kind of “just so” anecdote anchoring a story like this, especially when there is nothing else about the case reported in the story. While I’m not willing to go so far as to call it “fake news,” my editor’s eye immediately noticed the omission of any corroborating details. If a 10-year-old is pregnant, a crime has been committed, and the reader naturally expects such a story to include some comment from law enforcement officials where this crime occurred.
We don’t have that here. Of course, Dr. Bernard would cite medical confidentiality as a reason not to release information about the patient — except the age, because that makes for a good headline — but no reporter should accept this tale without corroborating information.
What this story reminds me of is Curry College in Massachusetts, where it was reported that swastikas were found on campus “directed at black individuals.” Six months later, the college reported:
The College carefully reviewed evidence gathered by law enforcement and interviewed the person of interest identified by law enforcement investigators and other individuals who were potentially connected to specific incidents. The outcome of our independent investigation has resulted in an employee being terminated and removed from our community. The College’s Statement on Non-Discrimination requires confidentiality related to investigations. Therefore, this is the only information we can provide at this time.
So, the former college employee who perpetrated this alleged hate crime is protected by school policy? You can’t even tell us anything which might confirm or contradict our suspicion that the whole thing was a hoax? How convenient, just like the similar confidentiality policy that Dr. Bernard would likely cite as why she can’t tell us anything else about this 10-year-old sex crime victim except that (a) she was 10, (b) she was from Ohio, and (c) she was more than six weeks pregnant in a state that recently outlawed abortion past six weeks gestation.
Nothing to see here, folks. Just another tiny example of how the news media are slowly destroying their own credibility.
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances…
– William Faulkner
This is, of course, the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the day of Pickett’s doomed charge against the Army of the Potomac’s center on Cemetery Ridge, and Custer’s more successful charge against Wade Hampton’s cavalry brigade in the East Cavalry Field. Meade is often criticized for not pursuing Lee’s army south on the fourth day, but what critics overlook is that the Army of the Potomac had been mixed and muddled in the successful defense of Culp’s Hill, Cemetery Ridge, and the Round Tops. Regiments and brigades were all scrambled together, and in fact Meade and his commanders spent the next day trying to sort out their units and get organized. This is not at all a situation like McClellan at Antietam, where he had entire corps of infantry that had done little or no fighting and were still coherent. Anyhow, this is supposed to be a book post, so let’s have at it.
In my arrogant opinion, probably the best of the Civil War historians is Bruce Catton, whose grasp of the politico-military mess that was the Army of the Potomac is unparalleled. Mr. Lincoln’s Army, the first book in his trilogy of books on that often unhappy but ultimately victorious force is on sale at $2.99 for the Kindle, and one can, of course, get used copies in hardback and paper for about the same price. His account of Gettysburg, The Final Fury, is brief – 100 pages – but covers the battle hour by hour. This appreciation post wouldn’t be complete without mentioning his trilogy covering the entire war, which begins with The Coming Fury, an excellent survey of the political tensions between the Northern and Southern states that led to secession and war.
Probably the best-known novel about Gettysburg is Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, and for good reason. Shaara shows you the commanders and the soldiers on both sides as people, blending the personal dramas into the fire and fury of the larger battle, and bringing fresh fame to John Buford and Joshua Chamberlain. The movie version, Gettysburg, is also worth watching.
There are many alternate histories of the Civil War, but for my money the best of the lot is the trilogy co-authored by Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen, Gettysburg, Grant Comes East, and Never Call Retreat, which starts with the assumption that Lee takes Longstreet’s advice and forces Meade to come to him by getting between Meade and Washington; the resulting defeat forces Lincoln to call on the ever-victorious Ulysses S. Grant. If Grant had failed, perhaps the future would look more like Ward Moore’s Bring The Jubilee than our current state of affairs…
Back in my wargaming days, when SPI was working on A Gleam Of Bayonets, their game about Antietam using (basically) the same system as Terrible Swift Sword, the designer referred to Stephen Sears’ Landscape Turned Red as one of his sources for information about the game, and while one might expect that Sears’ book is just a dry recitation of events, it is nothing of the kind. Instead, it gives you a ringside seat to not only the clumsy generalship of McClellan, but the hideous carnage that laissez-faire command style produced. Highly recommended.
What do we really need say about legendary actress Ava Gardner? One can only wonder how her kids with Frank Sinatra would have turned out…anyway, here she is in a pinup pic before she hit it big in Hollywood. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
