Straight From The Hart

  My dad was married 5 times. My mother was his first wife and I am his first child. Back in the early 60’s he was married to his third wife, a really flamboyant woman, very likeable, impetuous. A buxom blonde. She had 4 boys by a previous marriage, all in the same age range as Lois and me. They didn’t live here but occasionally they came to Lebanon to visit my grandparents Rowden, and Daddy would come get us girls and we would all be together at my grandparents. One summer night in 1963 up in the night, somebody knocked on the door of our Wood St home. Mom (Grandma Dame) was sleeping downstairs. She got up – that’s what you did back in those days – and it was one of my Dad’s stepsons. He asked her if he could sleep out the rest of the night on her couch – that he had been out somewhere and was too tired and sleepy to drive back to the Jefferson City area. She told him yes and brought him a blanket and pillow. Kay and I were sleeping upstairs. (Lois was already married and no

  IThose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Studying history is necessary to avoid repeating past mistakes. This saying comes from the writings of George Santayana, a Spanish-born American author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was never more true than what has happened this past week with regard to the U.S. military’s success in taking out one of the most cruel and bloodthirsty terrorists our world has known in recent years. Qassim Suleimani, Iran's terror mastermind, was on a rapid mission to destroy our country and terrorize our citizens, possibly even planning another takeover of one or more of our embassies and holding more American citizens hostage. Yet there were those among our politicians and media elite who criticized the action taken by our president. They either have never read the accounts of that terrible time in our past, or have forgotten how the Iranians tortured non-military American citizens in those days. Bu