Tom McMahon

Anna and Petro Cuprisin

Anna and Petro Cuprisin

A bit of his family's story from Tim Cuprisin on the 100th anniversary of the birth of his father, John Cuprisin:

John Cuprisin was born in Marblehead, Ohio, on April 3, 1910. To talk to him, you would have pegged him as an immigrant. His accent betrayed a Middle European background. When my dad was two, his father, Petro Cuprisin packed up the family and returned to the village where he was born, Hrabovčík. Today, the village is in northeastern Slovakia, but back then it was in Austria-Hungary.

Family lore says my grandfather got a letter from the village to tell him that his own father, also named Petro Cuprisin had died. My grandfather was the oldest son, and would have inherited the scattered patches of land around the village that made up the Cuprisin homestead. Since arriving in the US in the early years of the 20th Century, my grandfather had worked in a limestone quarry.

But the prospect of land of his own must have been a strong temptation, and my grandparents packed up the family -- my father, his older brother, Andy, and two sisters, Anna and Helen -- and took the opposite of the immigrant journey, returning to the homeland. As the story goes, my grandfather arrived in Hrabovčík in 1912 to find his own father very much alive.

According to this tale, my grandfather's younger brothers were jealous of his success in the U.S. and made up the story. Whether that's true or not, my grandfather and his family found themselves working the family farm on June 28, 1914, when gunshots rang out in another part of Austria-Hungary, Sarajevo, killing the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie.

Transcript Of Letter, Dated January 23, 1853, From Jane Pierce, Wife Of U.S. President Franklin Pierce, To Her Dead Son Benny. Benny Was Killed In A Train Accident Only Weeks Before His Father's Inauguration As President

From the New Hampshire Historical Society's collection of Franklin Pierce papers:

My precious child - I must write to you, altho' you are never to see it or know it - How I long to see you and say something to you as if you were as you always have been (until these last three dreadful weeks) near me. Oh! How precious do those days now seem, my darling boy - and how I should have praised [sic] the days passed with you had I suspected they might be so short - Dear, dear child - I cannot bear to think of that agonizing [sic] time, when I had just seen you all alive to what was passing around and near me, but not near enough - oh had you but been within reach of your dear father - in a moment changed my dear boy bright form into a lifeless one insensible to your parents' agony - But you spirit yourself, my dear one - was not your redeeming savior ready to receive you? Your sweet little brother? Your dear Uncle Lawrence? - but you are beyond my knowledge at once - Ah, I trust in joy, but I would fain have kept you here - I know not how to go on without you - you were my comfort dear - far more than you thought. I was thinking how pleasantly we should go on together when we found ourselves at home again - and I would do everything to make you love me and have confidence in me and bring you along gently and sweetly - Oh! You were indeed "a part of mine and of your father's heart". When I have told you dear boy how much you depended on me, and felt that you could not do without me - I did not say too how much I depended on you and oh! My precious boy how gladly would I recall all that was unreasonable - or hasty - or mistaken in my conduct toward you. I see surely and I did frequently see afterward that I had wronged you - and would have gladly acknowledged it only that I feared it might weaken your confidence in me and perhaps on that account not be as well for you - and now I am at home again dear boy. Oh what anguish was mine on returning without you, and feeling that it must still be so, while I live - to see your little bed that you loved so much - and which I look at many times in the day, and at night feel as if I must see it shape [?] out again and the clothes turned down for you - and unconsciously look in the morning for it and you - and listen for your bright cheerful voice your blithe "good morrow" - and oh! to look around and see your books and everything so connected with you - your dear self - and now on this Sabbath which you loved so much as you said often how I have marked for you each hour with its wonted occupation - and oh to think of you kneeling by me at our evening prayer tonight, dear child - has not the Savior made you His as we so often asked. But now I must kneel alone and beg for strength and support under this crushing sorrow, that the blessed Savior would comfort the heart of your pain stricken Mother - and help me better to bear the burden of your loss which has brought desolation such as I have never (with all my former griefs) known.

Dear precious boy! I have passed through the bitter time of leaving our home, and without my child, my own dear Benny. How did I think of you - dear - in every moment - of all your little parting notes and the many good-byes - and again the ride in those rail cars agonizing to my soul - we went in to the same little saloon as when we went down to Andover the last time - we three then, now only two - but we seemed to see you as when there before - and now we are in Boston, still without ,you, but I fancying what I should do and what I should say to you - continually, and now we must "journey on e'en when grief is sorest" with the whole head sick and the whole heart faint. I will "look to Jesus" (how often I have directed you to him my precious one) and sought his blessing for you and myself - but my son, my dear son, how much I feel my own faults in regard to you - I know that I did not take the right way and should have dealt with you very gently often when I judged hastily and spoke harshly. I can see that I was "unreasonable" and sometimes almost wonder that you loved me at all. God help me now to correct in bitterness my errors when oh! It is too late for you to have the sweet benefit of it - and now this Sabbath evening you will come in fancy before me and I sit close by you, with your hand in mine perhaps, or you will lean against me on the sofa, or as sometimes you did on Sunday evening sit on my lap a little while and we talk together and say hymns and then play and then by and by you go to bed first putting your arms around me and laying your dear head on my shoulder and then you get in your bed and we have our Sabbath night kiss - but to think I can never have another - Oh Benny, I have not valued such a sweet blessing as I ought.

via the American Presidents Blog

Cotton Watts, The Last Blackface

Cotton Watts, The Last Blackface

Note that date on the bottom: 1967! This fellow actually saw Watts in action:

I saw Watts by default. A friend of mine, a stripper, had taken me to see a competitor. We had left in an aesthetic huff (hers, not mine) when the performer came onstage and proceeded to remove her long white gloves. "Amateur! F*cking amateur!" hissed my companion. "Any professional knows you take the gloves off last. When they see your arms, the show's over." So we had wandered around the block and into another club to watch the aging Watts gamely fend off hecklers, armed with nothing but material at least fifty years old ("I thought I told you to stay in the truck!").

Writer Ken Brooks gives us a little perspective on Watts:

The best that can be said of Cotton Watts, the Florida Panhandle's last professional blackface entertainer, is that he was the product of an unenlightened age. From 1947 to 1959, Watts was a staple of Panama City Beach summer nightlife, appearing at both the 98 Club and the near-by Surf-and-Sand Club. Watts, a white entertainer, would perform parodies of the traditional songs, dances, and speech patterns of southern rural African-Americans, his face darkened with burnt cork.

Watts' career dated to the 1920s when he and Bud Davis formed a blackface duo that toured the nation's leading vaudeville circuits. It was Davis, manager of Panama City's Ritz Theater, who brought Watts to town. Watts performed three shows nightly, with his wife Chick--also in blackface--acting as mistress of ceremonies.

You can watch Cotton Watts for yourself on the internet. He shows up for about two minutes in Ed Wood's 1954 film Jail Bait:

Cotton Watts in Jail Bait

A quick review of those two minutes:

There is one scene i can't forget to mention... about 15 minutes or so in the movie, it cuts to a minstrel show with one of the most hilariously racist characters i've ever seen named Cotton Watts. But this scene is unrelated to anything before or after, and this comical scene is in stark contrast to the deadly serious mood of the rest of the movie. No one mentions it at any point of the film. It's like it's a scene from another movie, that was accidentally added in.

Cotton Watts passed away on March 5, 1968.

The Late Howard Zinn

An excerpt:

Howard Zinn was a Stalinist in the years when the Marxist monster was slaughtering millions of innocent people and launching his own ‘final solution’ against the Jews. Put another way, Howard Zinn was helping Stalin to conduct those slaughters and to enslave  all those who had the misfortune to live behind the Iron Curtain.  Howard never had second thoughts about his commitment to leftwing totalitarians and never flagged in his political commitment to freedom’s enemies. In the years since Stalin’s death, Zinn supported every enemy of the United States in every war, and devoted his writing talents to every socialist tyrant including Mao Zedong who killed 70 million Chinese in peacetime because they got in the way of his progressive agendas.

When the Cold War was over and freedom had won — thanks to all the political forces and figures (e.g., Reagan and Thatcher) that Zinn opposed – Zinn continued his malignant course. He supported America’s enemies right to the end including the Islamic Nazis whose first agenda is to finish the job that Hitler started and then to impose a totalitarian theocracy on the infidel world.

Zinn’s wretched tract, A People’s History of the United States, is worthless as history, and it is a national tragedy that so many Americans have fallen under its spell. It is a political cartoon which even the socialist magazine Dissent described as an intellectual fraud, which it is. All Zinn’s writing was directed to one end: to indict his own country as an evil state and soften his countrymen up for the kill. Like his partner in crime, Noam Chomsky, Zinn’s life’s work was a pernicious influence on the young and ignorant, with destructive consequences for people everywhere.

The Bagpiper’s Tale: A Personal Testimony

As a bagpiper, I’m often called upon to play at weddings, military events, and funerals. Recently I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside service for a homeless man. The man had no family or friends, so the service was set at the county pauper’s cemetery in the Kentucky back woods.

I was not familiar with the backwoods and soon found myself lost. Being a typical man I didn’t stop to ask for directions. I finally arrived an hour late – the staff from the funeral home was long gone and the hearse was nowhere in sight.

There were only the diggers and crew left and they were eating lunch. I felt badly and apologized to the men for being late. I went to the side of the grave and looked down. The vault lid was already in place. I didn’t know what else to do, so I started to play….

The workers put down their lunches and began to gather around. I played out my heart and soul for this man with no family and friends. I played like I’ve never played before for this homeless man.

And as I played ‘Amazing Grace,’ the workers began to weep.

They wept. I wept. We all wept together.

When I finished I packed up my bagpipes and started for my car.

Though my head hung low my heart was full.

As I opened the door to my car, I heard one of the workers say, “I never seen nothin’ like that before and I’ve been putting in septic tanks for twenty years."

via e-mail from my most faithful and most appreciated contributor Richard E. Swanson.

While Natural Calamities Do Not Discriminate Between Rich Countries And Poor Ones, Their Effects Almost Invariably Do

From the WSJ:

The earthquake is also a reminder that while natural calamities do not discriminate between rich countries and poor ones, their effects almost invariably do. The 1994 Northridge quake was nearly as powerful as the one that struck Haiti, but its human toll was comparatively slight. The difference is a function of a wealth-generating and law-abiding society that can afford, among other things, the expense of proper building codes.

In the long term, the best defense against future natural disasters is to promote the political and economic conditions that can move people out of the slums and shanties that easily become death traps. For now, however, we wish godspeed to the armies of relief headed for Haiti's desperate shore.

How Do We Know They Could Talk?

From Snake Jazz by Dave Baldwin:

Many years ago, I attended one of Professor Frederick Hulse’s anthropology seminars at the University of Arizona. There, a student asked Dr. Hulse how we might know, from archeological evidence, that people were capable of speech. Dr. Hulse replied, “We can be sure of this, at least, when we find graves containing old people.” His reasoning was that old people aren’t much good for doing anything but talking. If they are found in graves, they must have been kept alive for many years because they had some value to their society. They were given the opportunity to get old because they had something to say that was deemed worth listening to.

Is This The Ring That Inspired Tolkien To Write The Lord of the Rings?

Is This The Ring That Inspired Tolkien To Write The Lord of the Rings?

From The National Trust:

Placed for years within a glass-topped cabinet, beside a little type-written note, this solid gold ring might have caught the eye of specialists – but for most it might warrant no more than an admiring glance.

Made in the fourth or fifth century, with its chunky bezel mounted on a faceted 10-sided hoop, it is engraved with a compelling, if primitive profile of Venus. This goddess is no beauty, with her exaggerated nose, spiky headdress and one oversized eye.

The ring was discovered in the late 18th century by a farmer at the remains of the nearby Roman town of Silchester.

No one knows quite how the ring came to The Vyne, but its story did not stop there. By an extraordinary coincidence, just a couple of decades after its discovery, a Roman lead tablet bearing an inscription about this very ring was found at a temple site at Lydney in Gloucestershire. It was engraved with a curse imprecating woe upon the person who had stolen the ring.

The original lead tablet is now at Lydney; but alongside this ring in the little cabinet is a replica, so the two can be admired together.

By 1928 the great archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler was at work excavating the rich finds at Lydney where he was told the tale of the two finds.

And, so some conjecture, it is almost certain that he would have passed this exciting story to another who was advisor to finds at Lydney – an expert in early English – an Oxford don, named Tolkien.

A ring – and a curse. Enough to make anyone wonder: could this be the ring that inspired an iconic tale, my precious? We, of course, couldn’t possibly comment...

More here.

Independent and Third-Party Candidates Who Have Lost Elections in All 50 States

While Walter Mondale remains the only major-party politician to have accomplished this feat, commenter John Galt asks "What about all those minor third party candidates we see every 4 years?" Yes, there are some, but probably not as many as you think.

First of all, we're only talking about candidates who have run after 1959, when Alaska and Hawaii became states. And then the candidate had to get on the ballot in all 50 states, which even today is not the easiest thing in the world.

Here are the "other" Presidential candidates who have lost all 50 states:

• 1980: John B. Anderson (Independent)
• 1980: Ed Clark (Libertarian)
• 1992: Ross Perot (Independent)
• 1992: Andre Marrou (Libertarian)
• 1996: Ross Perot (Reform)
• 1996: Harry Browne (Libertarian)
• 2000: Pat Buchanan (Reform)

In addition, the running mates of the above candidates have to be considered:

• 1980: John B. Anderson: Patrick Lucey
• 1980: Ed Clark: David H. Koch
• 1992: Ross Perot: James Stockdale
• 1992: Andre Marrou: Nancy Lord
• 1996: Ross Perot: Pat Choate
• 1996: Harry Browne: Jo Jorgensen
• 2000: Pat Buchanan: Ezola B. Foster

The only caveat is the in some states the third-party deadline to get on the ballot is such that the official running mate hasn't been named by then, so they put a placeholder on the ballot.

Any others I've missed?

1859 Public Auction: Negroes For Sale

1859 Public Auction: Negroes For Sale