A couple of big surprises ….
A couple of big surprises on my weekly trip around the countryside were the Amish starting to thresh, so I’m seeing grain shocks in the fields are gone until next summer. The other surprise is that suddenly I can’t see over the tops of the corn as I drive by.
Besides that, a lot of hay is still being made. Kind of like make hay while the sun shines. It’s been that kind of a summer. Then another field had the appearance of just being planted. A couple of hundred birds were checking it over. I suppose looking for worms and bugs.
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The South Jetty newspaper came the other day and the hurricane didn’t even make the headline. While they had wind and rain and some sea surge, it wasn’t enough to do any serious damage. About the biggest loss was the portapotties and garbage that you may have seen on television floating around. The city manager took the blame for that, but figured insurance would cover their loss.
The main hit was about 20 miles south on North Padre, which they showed but credited it to Corpus Christi. In Texas, there are only cities and counties. So naturally Corpus took the liberty to annex most of southern Mustang before Port A got a wish and annexed the rest.
Luckily the hurricane crossed over in Kenedy County, which is just south of Kingsville. It is mostly desert with only about 500 people living in the whole county, where it had plenty of room to blow itself out, except for the heavy rains.
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The top headline was the completion of a new ferry staging area, which they hope will eliminate the long lines of traffic waiting to leave the island on one of the six ferries. They did have a large loop that followed the street into Roberts Park, but on busy days it wasn’t enough and the line backed up way into downtown, creating lots of traffic problems.
The project cost six million dollars so I suppose it deserved the top headline.
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Another story caught my eye as I read through the paper. They had interviewed a game warden who works for the state of Texas. If you watch the Animal Planet channel on television, you have probably watched Lone Star Law, a program about the Texas game wardens. On a number of times I caught glances of scenes taken at Port A, either on the jetty on the ship channel or dealing with someone with a drinking problem on the beach.
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During my recovery from oral surgery, Mark stayed with me a few days and we really covered a lot of ground, reminiscing about the good old days. He also amazes us when he starts reciting things that happened years ago. Either he has a great history book or a memory beyond what any human being might have.
Like last Thursday, Aug. 6. I thought it was pretty neat to be the day after the Aug. 5 TRG had come out. Instead he reminded me of three really important days in history.
First it was the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, back in 1945. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagaski, killing over 200,000 people in the two bombs going off.
Seems to me we had been shocking grain when we heard about it on the radio. Television was still a few years away.
The death toll was terrible, but long range planning for the invasion of Japan in World War II saw the death toll of Americans to also be that many or more. The Japanese lived with the theory that they would rather die than be captured, which the military was already learning, as they moved through the islands of the Pacific toward Japan.
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Also on that day in 1945, the United States lost one of its war heroes when Richard Bong crashed in a P-80 jet plane he was testing. Bong, a native of Poplar, Wisconsin, had already shot down 40 Japanese planes and the idea was to bring him back to the United States before he got shot down in the Pacific Theater.
Bong flew the P-38, a twin engine plane which had a very distinctive design. I know there is one in the Bong Museum in Superior, but am not sure if there is also one at Poplar, a small town just out of Superior.
He was certainly one of my heroes in World War II, born on Sept. 24, just a year later than my brother Ernest in 1920. Being from a small town like Poplar, population about 500 people, helped make him a real hero to many of us at the time.
We visited the new Bong Museum in Superior some years ago, but would certainly enjoy seeing it again.
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The last historic event for Aug. 6 is the signing by President Lyndon Johnson of the bill known as the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Prior to that, many southern states in particular required a poll tax or testing, which pretty well eliminated many blacks from even registering to vote.
The law banned discrimination for racial differences which had excluded most blacks from voting.
