And God Made a Farmer

I think a lot of people saw the Super Bowl ad by Ram trucks by Paul Harvey about God made a farmer. I grew up in the Mid-west and listen to Paul Harvey on WGN radio. He had a great radio voice and whether I agreed with him or not when it came to his political slant you could not argue he voiced a spirited vision of American.

However, as I went about to find the actual copy I have found that this inspiring has become politicalized mostly a cause celeb for conservatives. That is such a shame. I suppose it is because of television and the internet that the most benign events become political statements. What a sad state of affairs. Why can't a person be human. Why does everybody feel a need to 'correct' those who make mistakes. "Political Correctness' has become a disease that infects all sides of a position, political party, religion, culture or social movement. This is not the America Paul Harvey was  talking about.

The America of the 40's and 50's was far from perfect. It did have what you would call it's version of political correctness. Just look at Joe McCarthy. But most Americans regardless of their race, ethnicity, sexual preferences still had a spirit that was tough enough to live with the unfairness of life, be strong and not whine about every little perceived wrong.

The reason that is important is because then important injustices were easier and more clear to see.

But I digress from what I wanted to talk about today.

The reason Paul Harvey's essay resonates with me is because the farmer represents the best in men and human nature. The farmer is the most hopeful person there is. He plants his seeds in the spring with the hope that come autumn he will have a harvest. He works diligently without complaining about the pay or benefits. The benefit he receives is more than money can buy. He receives a sense of pride in his abilities and resourcefulness. His sense of an "Almighty" comes from his connection to the land and respect for power of nature and the orderliness of nature.  The farmer embodies the virtues of hard work, self-reliance and determination to stick it out through hard times.

And yet the farmer was generous. Of course there were exceptions. But when you work the land you understand the bounty you had this year may not be yours next year and to help your fellow man, family, or community was a duty for next year you may be the one in need.

And the very nature of farming teaches you to be respectful of what you do have and because they respect their hard work they respect the need to save for that future day when they may not have a bountiful harvest.

The Farmer understand the cycle of seasons, that good time do not last nor do bad times. They understand that death is part of Life and both are to be respected and reverenced.

I think that this essay is a good reminder of what makes America a good nation and  gives Americans a noble nature, and one that people still immigrate too for a better life.

I am concluding todays entry by posting Paul Harvey's essay: And God Made A Farmer.

And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, "I need a caretaker." So God made a farmer.

God said, "I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board." So God made a farmer.

"I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery, come home hungry, have to wait lunch until his wife's done feeding visiting ladies and tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon -- and mean it." So God made a farmer.

God said, "I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt. And watch it die. Then dry his eyes and say, 'Maybe next year.' I need somebody who can shape an ax handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make harness out of haywire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. And who, planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, then, pain'n from 'tractor back,' put in another seventy-two hours." So God made a farmer.

God had to have somebody willing to ride the ruts at double speed to get the hay in ahead of the rain clouds and yet stop in mid-field and race to help when he sees the first smoke from a neighbor's place. So God made a farmer.

God said, "I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bails, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark. It had to be somebody who'd plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk and replenish the self-feeder and finish a hard week's work with a five-mile drive to church.

"Somebody who'd bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says he wants to spend his life 'doing what dad does.'" So God made a farmer.

I Know Something Good About You

I Know Something Good About You

Wouldn't this old world be better
If the folks we meet would say, "I know something good about you!"
And then treat us just that way?

Wouldn't it be fine and dandy If each handclasp warm and true
Carried with it this assurance, "I know something good about you!"

Wouldn't life be lots more happy, if the good that's in us all
Were the only thing about us' that folks bothered to recall?

Wouldn't life be lots more happy, If we praised the good we see? -
For there's such a lot of goodness in the worst of you and me.

Wouldn't it be nice to practice that fine way of thinking, too?-
You know something good about me! I know something good about you!

-Author Unknown

I found this poem and thought what a classic and positive way to view Life.

Enjoy

Your Classic Guy

A Tribute to Etta James

My mother always told me, even if a song has been done a thousand times, you can still bring something of your own to it. I'd like to think I did that. ~Etta James~


• NAME: Etta James
• OCCUPATION: Singer
• BIRTH DATE: January 25, 1938
• DEATH DATE: January 20, 2012
• PLACE OF BIRTH: Los Angeles, California





Etta James was singer who crossed many genres of music including blues, R&B, rock and roll, soul gospel and jazz.

For me she captured the blues with all the melancholy and sadness that comes from deep down in all of us at some time in life. Even her signature song At Last has to go down as one of the greatest vocals ever. At Last always struck me to be kind of a paradox. It is a love song; a romantic song but it has that blues undertone. It is magical and many a sweethearts danced to this song and a spell was cast over them. Maybe it was because it touched that place where the blues and hope meet.

I encourage every one to listen to more of Etta James and her song style and see for yourself how it moves you. She was a great singer. She will be missed. She was a classic woman.

Bowling in the 50's Part I

Bowling in the Fifties

Going to a bowling alley is a fun experience. It's an auditory experience as the spinning ball hits the wooden floor of the alley and moments later you hear that thunder sound of the pin exploding apart when the ball strikes them.

Or that dead sound of a gutter ball. There are the lights and the cheers when someone gets a strike. It’s about family and it’s about dates and couples, bowling leagues and friends. Today bowling alleys have incorporated more high tech gadgetry to entertain us which reflects our modern world.

Let’s go back to The Fabulous Fifties when bowling really took off as a sport and a place to socialize. A bowling alley or bowling center played a roll whether it was in the city or a rural area or new suburban towns that grew out of the post-World War II housing boom for the returning vets.

The post-World War II housing boom created a new kind of a neighborhood where people could go with shared interests. What grew out of those neighborhoods were bowling leagues and even more casual bowling evenings out with neighbors

It was a gathering place where parents knew there children would be safe.

Neighbors could get together weekly to get a night out and be adults. I think the unions had an influence on the popularity of bowling leagues. It became a place for men to go to have fun together instead of just work together

Bowling alleys were much different prior to the 1951 and the game was revolutionized when the new AMF Pinspotters came out. To a little boy in the early fifties they must have looked like robots from the science fiction magazines of the day.

But to understand the impact of that machine on a little boy of that time let’s go back a bit further to the Fabulous Forties.

If you had been on the north side of Chicago at that time for example, you might have walked into a bowling alley and waited while they woke up the ‘pinboy’ to set the pins up for you to play.

Bowling wasn't as popular and might have had only one pinboy in the place. It would have cost you 25 cents per game and 10 cents for the shoes. The bowling alley might have been a place for men to get together to drink and bet on how many pins might be knocked down. It was a different atmosphere not your family atmosphere as you might think of in the 50’s or even today.

Here’s a little bit of business history. In 1951 AMC introduced a pinsetter. AMF stands for the American Machine Foundry Co. In the 1940’s the company manufactured automated cigarette machine and baking, and stitching machines After World War II ended, the son of the founder Mr. Patterson decided that in order for the company to grow he had to search for new products. He came across a crude prototype of an automatic bowling-pin setter. He purchased the patent rights and with work and modification AMF perfected the AMF Pinspotter, and brought it to the market in 1951/52. No longer did an owner of a bowling alley have to rely on "pinboys.". This invention helped turn bowling into one of the most popular American sports to participate in and to compete competitively too.
Now organized, with agreed-upon standards, the game grew in popularity.
In the 1950’s that new medium television embraced bowling and the game's popularity grew even more. NBC's was the first network to cover bowling with "Championship Bowling". Coverage proliferated with shows like "Make That Spare,", "Celebrity Bowling", and "Bowling for Dollars."

ABC in 1961 began to telecast bowling competition of the Pro Bowlers Association and it became one of ABC sports most popular watched shows. I remember my father watching that weekly.

Today bowling has fallen victim to the competition and promotions of other sports conglomerates the most popular is football. And there is the internet, activities such as on-line gaming, social networks that now compete for our time and have diminished the popularity of bowling.

The 1950’s also brought a futuristic and exotic themed architecture to the bowling centers of that time and it added to the whole appeal of bowling’s popularity.

The bowling alley is another part of vanishing Americana that has fallen on hard times in recent years In Southern California with skyrocketing land values the large parcels land have become attractive to developers and many of these centers have been torn down and replaced with malls or parking lots or more speculative developments. These classic centers are threatened with

extinction. Luckily there are community groups and preservationist groups that are trying to save these gathering disappearing from our landscape and our collective memory.

Bowling was part of the Fabulous Fifties that spoke to the growth of suburban American. It was connected to the new broadcast medium called television. It was about community and having fun with friends, neighbors and family. It’s still a great activity that way today. Give it a try. Maybe have a 50’s bowling party. What fun it could be.

It's A Wonderful Life

Well the holidays are done. Before we say goodbye to them I’d like to write about one of my holiday favorite movies; It’s A Wonderful Life directed by Frank Capra. This story which can be taken on so many levels seems to speak also about today’s world.

If you have never seen this film it is a bittersweet post-WWII war tale of an earnest and good man George Bailey (James Stewart) who lives in a small town Bedford Falls. George wants to get out of that small town and makes his fortune in the world. Well through a series of events out of his control George does the better thing for others including taking over his fathers Building and Loan which is for the good of a whole town. George struggles against Potter (Lionel Barrymore) a greedy banker and business man. Potter controls real estate, the Bank, stores the whole town and keeps the towns people without a way to better themselves.

George eventually marries Mary (Donna Reed) a loving and stand-behind-your-man kind of woman and has several children. He manages to keep the Building and Loan afloat, even through the harrowing days of the Depression. By the conniving hand and manipulation of Potter, George is wrongfully accused of mishandling funds and faces bankruptcy, scandal and even possible imprisonment. Despondent, he is about to take his own life, but the people who love him have been praying for him, so God sends an angel, Clarence (Henry Travers), to prevent his fatal act. When George states, "I wish I was never born," Clarence shows him what life in the town and elsewhere would be like had that been the case.

The ending is better seen than words can do but George learns that his life has had a purpose and his efforts have made the lives of others better. The town rallies around George supporting him collectively with their small and big donations and by extension supporting their own town and themselves and Clarence the angel earns his angel wings.

There are lots of themes and morals that underscore this movie. But I thought Generation X and Y and even the Baby Boomers could use a brief history on the importance of the Savings and Loan and what it meant for the average American because Potter represents one kind of American and George represents another kind.

Building and Loans.

You now live in an American where only one-third of the Americans owned a home and they were the wealthy. Your annual income might be $1500, maybe up to $2,200.00 if you were a white collar accountant. You are paying rent to live in marginal housing so you borrow the money to buy your own house which might be about $7000.00.

The situation you face is that you are only paying interest on the money and in five years you have to pay back the entire loan amount. As such, many people were either perpetually in debt in a continuous cycle of refinancing their home purchase, or they lost their home through foreclosure when they were unable to make the balloon payment at the end of the term of that loan.

Now a man like George Bailey has a Building and Loan Association and they specialize in accepting savings deposit and then taking the money and lending it back to the people in the community. You have an association of people who live and work in the same place lending money to the same people. They are often called mutual savings banks meaning the depositors and borrowers are members with voting rights and have the ability to direct the financial AND managerial goals of the Building and Loan.

So you have an organization run locally for the benefit of the local community and not to make profits for a faceless corporation and bring large bonuses for executives that live elsewhere - not a bad concept.

Now at last you have a chance of ownership and knowing if you are consistent and pay your mortgage at sometime in the future you will not have to pay rent to anyone.

The 1950’s were the hay days of the building and loan associations using their 3-6-3 policy. The idea was to pay 3% interest for deposits and charge 6% on a thirty year mortgage with monthly amortization payments and be out playing golf by three o’clock every day.

The 1950’s saw a building boom to meet the new demand for housing cause by the swell in new families.

The building and loans of George Bailey helped create the stability for what would become the halcyon days that were the 1950’s.

In the movie George represent one kind of America where people could prosper, raise a family, and build a nest egg for their retirement years while Potter’s America people lived in debt, families and individuals lived pay check to pay check with nothing for their later years.

Yes I know this is a simple view of the economy. The point is It’s A Wonderful Life does give us a slice of the economic times of the 30’s, 40’s which became the Fabulous 50’s. The movie is more than a story about hard economic times but next time you watch the scene where there is a run a the local town bank and then on George’s building and loan, listen to how George explains what he does and how it benefits the whole town of Bedford Falls. It’s brief but entertaining economic lesson that we might learn some lesson for ourselves today.

If you want to read more about Building and Loans try these links:

http://www.answers.com/topic/building-and-loan-associations#ixzz1hxRGM0bn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_association

The Yule Log Tradition and Lore

The Yule Log

The Yule Log has been associated with Christmas for decades. In a rural America it was a tradition. It has enough importance that in the 1960’s WPIX Channel 11 in New York began to

televise a Yule Log for New Yorkers. The idea was people in apartments and homes without fireplaces could share in this Holiday tradition. You should go to http://tvparty.com/xmaslog.html to read more about this amazing story.

How significant is the Yule Log. I found a town in North Carolina that started a Yule Log Parade, an event that began in 1950. Each year, town’s people and visitors follow the Yule Log which is pulled by children on a sled through town to Legacy Park. Once the log is positioned in the open fireplace it is ignited. Everyone in the audience joins together and sings Christmas carols. To learn more go to: http://www.mcadenville-christmastown.com/ctyule.htm

I really like this tradition of the Yule Log. I did not have that tradition when I grew up. For
those of you, like me, that are unfamiliar with the Yule Log tradition this is your Classic-Guy Cliff Note version.

First, the Yule log is a large log and burning the log is a tradition that goes back before Christmas started. It really started as a Pagan holiday called Yule. It was a celebration that marked the Winter Solstice the longest night of the year and it marks the rebirth of the sun. Fundamentally it was a family day and a community day. And its purpose, as any good tradition should be is to bring hope for the future. For more information you may want to visit: http://www.wicca.com/celtic/akasha/yule.htm

The Yule celebration was adopted by Christianity and the log was then burned on the hearth as a way of celebrating Christmas in Europe. The lore was burning the log would bring prosperity in the coming year.

The tradition carried over from Europe to America and we have adapted it to our Christmas tradition.

For us who don’t have fireplaces you can use a log and use candles as symbolism for the fire of the Yule log. It is easy to do and a fun project for yourself or your children.

And with no disrespect to any religious traditions the Yule log transcends any one tradition. It is about community involvement and tradition. It is about family and bringing your own meaning to it.

It is as American as it is European and it is as contemporary as it is ancient. Yes this isn’t quite the post that directly relates to 40’s and 50’s. But it does bring some style and grace to a Holiday that has become, oh so, commercial.

Happy Yule Day!

Cookies for the Holidays

RED AND GREEN CHRISTMAS COOKIES RECIPE


3/4 cup soft unsalted butter
1 cup flour
1/2 cup confectioner's sugar
1/2 cup corn starch
1/2 teaspoon almond flavoring
red and green food coloring

Beat the butter until it is nice and smooth

Add the almond flavoring and beat it in.

Stir in the flour, cornstarch and confectioner's sugar, then beat until nice and smooth.

Divide the dough into two balls. Work the red food coloring into one ball, just a few drops, then work a few drops of the green food coloring into the other ball.

Now pinch off some dough from one ball, about the size of a walnut, and roll it into a ball in your hands. Work with one color, placing each ball on an ungreased cookie sheet.

Wash your hands and do the same with the other color. These cookies are not going to spread much, so you can fit a lot on a cookie sheet.

When all of your balls are formed, flatten them slightly with the back of a of a fork.

Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes or until the bottoms are golden.

There is nothing nicer than coming home to the smell of cookies baking in the oven. Holidays and food, especially treats like cookies, or cakes make for a festive feel. Cookies and cold milk is my favorite taste treat. Baking and giving cookies as gifts is not as popular today especially with two people working and work schedules being what they are. In fact receiving store bought cookies and treats seems to be more normal.

It might be a treat to go retro this year and make some cookies, dress yourself up and serve them to your family. Wouldn't Hubby be surprised and your children be delighted for homemade treats.

Or add some retro flair to having your single friends come over for cookie treats and put on some Bing Crosby Holiday songs, or watch White Christmas and have a retro Holiday party.