Straight From The Hart

Straight From The Hart Joan Rowden Hart Watching the news coverage of the performance of the Iron Dome over Israel has been a fascinating experience for me.  Certainly I support Israel in its defense efforts and regret that the Dome even has to be used for such a thing, but the news reports about the Dome remind me of an exciting time in my life back in the Reagan era. I  served as Laclede County chairman for the Reagan campaigns in the 80’s, and  In that context, one of Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham’s associates in the High Frontier organization approached me about becoming a part of the National Speakers’ Bureau for the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as the SDI. At that time, the defense policy of the United States consisted of the  Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, appropriately nick-named MAD, which simply meant that the Soviets knew that if they attacked us and killed our citizens, we had more than enough weapons to retaliate and kill even more of them, so in effect

Straight From The Hart By Joan Rowden Hart On the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving in 1964, just a week after Milan and I had celebrated our first wedding anniversary, we were at the Taylor Avenue Church of God practicing with the youth for our Thanksgiving service to be held the next night. We received a phone call at the church for Milan and me to go immediately to my grandmother’s home because something had happened to my youngest sister, Darella Kay Rowden, then 16 years of age and a junior at LHS. We arrived only minutes before Dorsey Howe, who sadly informed us that Kay had been killed in an automobile accident out on East Hwy 32, and her best friend, Beverly Cole, who was in the car with her, had been seriously injured. Our Thanksgiving was less than “happy” that year, but I learned a lesson I have never forgotten.  As human beings, our sometimes shallow perception of happiness is usually based on words related to being happy such as  happenings, mishap,  an