Reflections of An Uncommon Common Man

  I love strong women. Matter of fact I love women period. A black lady friend of ours once asked my son if he liked black women. He said "I just like women",  Right answer. Personally I hate to see women mistreated and I don't understand why some men want to possess or abuse women both verbally and physically. This is because it was drummed in to my head growing up, by my mother and my grandparents that a real man doesn't mistreat women. In addition the death of my mother at the hands of my father affected me greatly. After my parents died my Aunt Goldie (Didi) Anderson took my brother Mark and I to raise along with her own two children. She was a divorced woman raising four children on a single income. Luckily she didn't have to worry about childcare because she lived with my grandparents who watched us while she was at work. For the 1960's she had a good job with Southern Bell Telephone Company which is AT&T today. Unfortunately she was not makin...

If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from hell before breakfast. William Tecumseh Sherman As usual the press get's it wrong in it's reporting of a news event. As in most cases it is done intentionally. Trump did say that John McCain was not a war hero. However he immediately corrected himself and said four times in a row that McCain was a war hero. The following is what he actually said to Republican pollster Frank Luntz.  Luntz: "He’s a war hero. He’s a war hero …" Trump: "He’s not a war hero ..." Luntz: "He’s a war hero." Trump: "He is a war hero ..." Luntz: "Five and half years in a Vietnamese prison camp …" Trump: "He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured. So he’s a war hero …" Luntz: "Do you agree with that?" Trump: "He’s a war hero, because he was captured, okay? I belie...

  Jose Antonio Vargas has a new show on MTV where he questions squirming guilt ridden white people about their supposed white privilege. I wish Mr. Vargas would ask me about white privilege. I would then ask him a question. Who in the hell do you think you are? You are an illegal alien and have ignored our laws. Yet you are given your own television show and go around asking people about white privilege. Who is the privileged one here?. What country on earth, other than the USA, would award illegal behavior with a lucrative salary and a television show? Hey check out China or Russia and see if you get that kind of gig over there. The very race of people that you insult, by asking this question, gave you this opportunity.Viacom, which owns MTV, is primarily run by white people. Van Toffler, a white guy, is president of MTV. Instead of making the big bucks you should be in jail or having your ass deported.  Yes many white people have been guilty of evil in the past...

  Oklahoma became a state on November 16, 1907. The state had been settled by many white Southerners of whom many were former slave owners. Between 1907 and 1921 thirty-one people were lynched in the state and 26 of them were black. It had been settled by many blacks and a number were veterans of World War I. Tulsa Oklahoma had a sizeable population of blacks who had become very prosperous at a time when other blacks were not doing all that well on a national level. The Greenwood section of Tulsa was so prosperous that it was known as the Negro Wall Street. Blacks created businesses and services such as grocery stores, newspapers, movie theaters, nightclubs and churches. There were doctors, dentists, lawyers and clergy. An oil boom was going on and many blacks had benefited from it. On August 16, 1916, Tulsa passed an ordinance forbidding blacks or whites from residing on any block where three-fourths or more of the residents were of the other race. This kept the black sec...

  As a child growing up in the late 1950's and early 1960's this period was one of the happiest and scariest times of my life. I can't remember exactly when I became conscious of the threat of nuclear war but I just remember holding my ears whenever the grown-ups would talk about it. Starting in the late 1950's I can remember duck and cover drills. Sometimes we would do them out on the playground or inside our class rooms. Then there were the movies like On The Beach, Fail Safe and Dr.Strangelove. Or: How I learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. I never grew to love the bomb but I did learn to stop worrying. That would come years later when I was stationed at NORAD.  My grandparents lived behind Eastland Baptist Church and there was one of those yellow Civil Defense air raid sirens on top of the building that you would see on the roof tops all over Nashville. They would usually test it once a week at noon. If I was doing something when it went off, and had l...

  The Longest Day was shown at Nashville's Paramount theater for the twentieth anniversary of D-Day in 1964. My brother Mark and I rode the bus downtown and walked to the theater on Church street. The left front section of seats were roped off for veterans of the battle. When the movie was over I remember one veteran, who was probably in his late thirties or early forties, telling a buddy " I wish it had been that easy". The Longest Day was good for it's historical reality but it didn't show the reality of war in the way that Saving Private Ryan did. I ended up seeing the movie about three or four times at the Paramount and many times since. There was a long list of big stars in the movie. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Eddie Albert, Curt Jurgens, Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Paul Anka, Robert Ryan, Richard Todd, Rod Steiger, Red Buttons, Robert Wagner, Henry Fonda. and the list goes on and on. Henry Fonda played the role of Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Until then I ha...

The Battle Of Stones River   For many years I was invited to local schools to give presentations on the Civil War. I would pack up my bullets, cannon balls, bayonets, accoutrement's such as belt buckle, cartridge box plates, breastplate and buttons. This stuff is very heavy and by the time I was through I was as tired as if I had been working all day. I would carry an 1864 replica Springfield rifle to demonstrate to the children how the common soldier would load and fire a rifle in combat. How he would do it from the standing and prone position and how the average experienced soldier could fire as many as three rounds per minute. I would then place a percussion cap on the nipple of the rifle and after cocking the weapon pull the trigger. The percussion cap sounded like a firecracker going off and the kids would scream and nearly jump out of their seats but they loved this. After this I usually had their undivided attention from that point on. Sadly, in today's politically...