Straight From The Hart

Sixty-six years ago this week, a drastic change occurred in my life.  At least that’s how it seemed to me then.  Over the Christmas holidays in 1950, my family, consisting of myself and two younger sisters, my mother, and my maternal grandparents moved from a farmhouse out in the country into  a two story white stucco house in Old Town at the corner of Wood and Apple Streets.   I was seven years old and I didn’t know whether to be scared or excited about changing to a new school. I had started school in a one room country school in the Washington School District with Ruth Garrett as my teacher.  I loved her and also Thelma Prescott who taught second grade. My grandfather walked with me to that school the first couple of days and then I was left on my own to walk through a wooded area to a gravel road which took me to the school.   The biggest obstacle was getting over the fence that ran between our property and a ditch that bordered a gravel road.  My grandfather built a

Today is my mother’s 90th birthday.  Christmas Eve birthdays sometimes get lost in the holiday rush but she never lets us forget! She is housebound and is confined to her wheelchair but she enjoys life,  and treasures every day she can be in her own home.  Her house is small and well guarded by two large attack cats, but all her children and as many of her stepchildren and grandchildren as possible will be stopping by to visit with her sometime this weekend. She asked me this week what kind of “spiel” I would be putting in the paper for her.  She is just now learning about the picture and request for a card shower I had published last Saturday.  All week she has been calling and asking why she is getting birthday cards from people she doesn’t know or remember! We have talked in recent months more about her childhood and days gone by.  She was born and raised on a farm in Laclede County.  She loved to read and on rainy days she would climb up into the barn loft with her books to

On October 26 of this year, a very special dedication service was held at Camp Pendleton, CA, to honor a very special Marine. The Marine was Staff Sgt. Reckless, probably the most famous War Horse in American history and her dedication was the unveiling of a large bronze statue of her.  The dedication ceremony was attended by high-ranking U.S. Marines as well as veterans of the Korean War who served with her. Sgt.  Reckless was a “little white-faced” Mongolian mare.  Her name was a contraction of the name of the Recoilless rifle and also reflected the daredevil attitude of those who used the gun.  She was bought at a race track in Seoul during the Korean War and was trained by the Marines as a war horse, taught to walk over trip wires, avoid incoming enemy fire and deliver huge packs of ammunition during battle.  She  often carried wounded Marines on the front lines under enemy fire to safety. She quickly learned each supply route after only a couple of trips and often deliver

Another American hero has passed.  If you are in my age range, you probably feel like you grew up with our space program.  I’m not a soap opera fan but I remember a show called The Days of Our Lives and every time I read a news story about NASA and our astronauts, I think of how all the space events really were special days in our lives and how we remember where we were when those events happened. I was in Lebanon Junior High when every class had a discussion on October 5, 1957 as we first learned about Sputnik and I remember the day vividly, and the emotions expressed, especially by students much more interested in science than I was.   We were eating dinner at Munger Moss Restaurant the night of January 27, 1967, and the restaurant was unusually quiet and the atmosphere was solemn as we had all just heard about the fire aboard Apollo 1 which killed Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chafee I was on the road on my way to my Senate confirmation hearing in Jefferson Cit

Sunday, November 7, 1999 was an exciting day for Milan and me and our family members and friends as we gathered for our first service as the Oakland Heritage Church of God, in the building formerly known as the Oakland Moravian Methodist Church. I had learned in the early summer that the Methodists who had been worshipping there for many years were looking for another church group to take over the building, and the legal technicalities had taken most of the summer to get worked out. Shortly after we started having services there, we learned the history of the building - that it was one of the oldest church buildings in the county which had been in constant use as a church since it was built by Jacob Blickensderfer and his sons in 1887. Milan and I became immersed in the story of the Blickensderfer family, and the history of the Moravian church denomination.  We also came to the conclusion that Jacob Blickensderfer was one of the best kept secrets of Laclede County.  Everyo

Eating crow is not very pleasant but it can be tolerated if your only other option is starvation. And that’s where I found myself in the recent election. It is no secret that I got on board the Trump Train at the very last moment. I liked where it was going from the start, the scheduled stops along the way, i.e. his pro-life stand and his support for the 2nd Amendment, his strong belief in our capitalistic system, his business knowledge and acumen, his support of our military and his belief in a strong national defense, his belief that people of faith have a right to practice their faith without interference from the government. But I didn’t like the way he drove the train - the quick brakings that shook everyone up, the crazy exits over to a side track before coming back on the main line, and the constant questions about whether he even knew the way at all. But when he brought Mike Pence on board as the second conductor, I thought maybe it was safe to get on, too. Like many

One of my preacher friends on Facebook reported last week that  one of the children in his Sunday School class brought his Bible to him with a very puzzled look on his face.  The young man said, “Pastor, I’m having trouble finding the Thanksgiving story in my Bible.  Is it in the New or the Old Testament?” That may bring a smile to the faces of those of us who are Bible students but it illustrates a very important truth  - that it is impossible to separate the true meaning of Thanksgiving from some very profound tenets of the Judeo-Christian belief system, i.e. that God is sovereign, that He hears and answers prayer, and that He is faithful to the nations whose people are faithful to him. There are many parts to a traditional American Thanksgiving celebration.  If we wanted to alphabetize them it would be easy because  we could put them all under the letter “F”. First and foremost to some is the Food.  We Americans love our turkey and dressing and gravy, potatoes (both Iri

A document with a vague sounding name like Paris Agreement being bandied about in the cable news doesn’t garner much attention from the general public, even somebody like me who lives and breathes this stuff about 15 hours every day in one form or another. The “mentions” have become more prominent now as the Agreement has become a source of contention between our outgoing president and the incoming Trump administration. The Paris Agreement has to do with global warming, or climate change as the proponents now choose to call it.  The Agreement stems from a meeting in Paris held in December, 2015 at the 21st Conference of the Parties by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The language of the agreement was negotiated by representatives of 195 countries and adopted by consensus on December 15 of that year.  It went into effect on November 4 of this year, which explains the more than usual interest in recent weeks. The goal of the Agre

 You will notice this is dated in 2012. Facebook sent it to me this morning to remind me what I had written back then. Although I have often referred to Kay's death in my writings, this one goes into detail about what happened that night but also sets forth how and why our family handled it and other tragedies we have had, including a word study on happiness contrasted with joy. 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, an