Road Trip Report, Part 3

"I don’t know

if Jesus

could straighten

this mess out."

--Barry Strong,

retired educator

Searching for the

reel America:

pay dirt at the drive-in

Not every day do you meet an educator who can laugh about slapping handcuffs on his students.

That’s Barry Strong, a retired teacher and principal we found Thursday in about the unlikeliest place – a drive-in movie theater, in broad daylight.

We’d been driving south on Interstate 81 from Harrisonburg, Va., and turned off on what you might call a blue highway in search of some real America. We found it a bit past noon along Route 11, on the outskirts of the town of Lexington.

The marquee said it was closed, the season ended, but there was a pickup truck parked inside the fence and no barricade at the entrance lane, so we rode in hoping for my wife Bonnie to get some pictures of the empty place that might be symbolic of a dying but of Americana.

The truck belonged to the 61-year-old Strong, who was methodically waving a fancy metal detector over the dirt and grass in a back parking row searching for stray coins. Not that he needed the money for gasoline or anything; it was just a little pastime that sometimes turns up an old silver dime or half-dollar, but more often worthless debris.

“It’s been metal-detected before, but nobody gets it all,” he noted. “The trouble with metal detecting in a place like this is there’s so much junk in the ground, like pop tops. But it’s like fishing – you never know what you’re going to catch.”

Strong said he’s a Hull’s Angel – a member of a group of supporters and helpers at the drive-in, which remains a popular place around Lexington on warm summer nights. “They bring their blankets and get out on the grass. It’s a family-oriented place.”

The conversation quickly turned to politics, as I asked his views on the campaign. He says he expects to vote for John McCain, despite -- not because of -- his selection of Sarah Palin as his running-mate. For Strong, the choice is because he sees McCain as the most experienced candidate for president.

“I watched most of the debate last night,” he said. “I think McCain did a little better.”

But he acknowledged that “I got tired of hearing Joe’s name,” a reference to now-politically ubiquitous Ohioan Joe the Plumber, and lamented of that profession that “they won’t come out to see you for less than a hundred.”

“I read the Roanoke Times – I read the editorials every morning. They said they ought to vote all the incumbents out and start over. They couldn’t do worse than that. I don’t know if Jesus could straighten this mess out.”

Now about those handcuffs:

Strong said he started his career in 1970 as a sixth-grade teacher at Hartman Elementary School in Clarksburg, W.Va., at a salary of $6,000 and a classroom of 46 children. (Bonnie noted she had started her career in Baltimore in 1967, at then-Ben Franklin Junior High, making all of $5,800.)

Strong had some wonderful tales of those early days, like teaching the twin brothers Neil and Don, and the hot day in the un-air-conditioned school when Neil fell asleep at his desk and was directed out into the hall for the then-customary punishment: a paddling.

“He was crying and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Strong. It was hot, and we just ate....’ And he was right. So we went back in the classroom and I apologized to him in front of all the other children. And I handed him the paddle and told him to paddle me.”

Did he? You betcha.

“He reddened my ass,” Strong chuckled.

Later in his career, Strong said he became a teacher and administrator in juvenile detention facilities, including an assignment as assistant principal at the juvenile correctional prison in Beaumont, Va., where some of the students “were murderers.”

And that part of his career pretty much explains why “you could handcuff the students.”

Coming tomorrow: Outrageous roadside attractions

Road Trip Report, Part 2

Cemetery dust-off

trumps debate for this blogger

Something you didn’t know: There’s folks who travel around the country spending their valuable free time cleaning up old tombstones.

We met two of them Wednesday in the bury patch high above historic Harpers Ferry, W.Va. – women ignoring a late run of biting flying insects to get down on their knees, gently brush dirt off and rub a length of chalk across time-weathered names and inscriptions.

Their T-shirts bore the name of their organization, Cemetery Surveys Inc., which is endeavoring to document online the names and histories gleaned from this painstaking work. The chalk makes the names and at least some of the old inscriptions a little more visible, enabling the women to record them with a digital photograph.

The Harper Cemetery had plenty of work for them, with burials dating back two centuries.

Nema Mobley (shown in Bonnie’s photo above) was one of the volunteers, a retired middle school teacher from Cherokee County, Georgia, who probably got no more appreciation from most of her students than she received from those long dust in the ground beneath her aging knees.

You can check out the organization’s Web site at http://cemeterysurveysinc.org. It has information on thousands of the documented departed, but talk about an uphill struggle – they’ve probably got millions to go before they sleep.

Other sights along the way

As I noted, the cemetery is high above the town – and climbing the many steps up the hillside was the biggest ordeal of the day aside from swatting away the gnats and biting bugs awakened by a warm October.

I hadn’t been in the streets of Harpers Ferry for 40 years, and was impressed by restoration work that has kept the nucleus of the waterfront town alive and the friendly and informative National Park Service staff.

I asked, in the old general store, about one of the items in a display case labeled as a piece of the rope used to hang John Brown – the leader of an anti-slavery band that staged the ill-fated raid for which Harpers Ferry draws its most lasting fame.

A young Park Service guide on duty there noted an old history of the event written by a resident from that era, which pointed out that if all the purported pieces of the rope sold as souvenirs were authentic, it would have been long enough to hang John Brown from the moon. (The author, it was also said, was also a bit of an Irish drunk whose accounts may have been... well, embellished is a kind word.)

After nearly four hours in Harpers Ferry, we headed south through Front Royal and along about 75 miles of Skyline Drive – which on weekends is packed with visitors gawking at views of fall foliage. There was little traffic on a Wednesday, however, but foliage at the lower elevations had not yet peaked.

Still, it was a nice drive that got us within a 150-haul of our next destination in Blacksburg, Va., and to a decent Comfort Inn at Harrisonburg well in time for the Great (Last) Debate of the presidential campaign. So, it’s on to....

McCain v. Obama, Opus Three

Cut the crap, you Republicans. McCain got clobbered again.

For one thing, maybe I missed it somewhere, but I thought Palin had an infant with Down syndrome, and McCain kept talking about her expertise with autism. A little forgetful? I'd hope that Palin is expert in all manner of developmental disablities, particularly Down syndrome, and that she and her family do a great job in raising their newborn to achieve all that is possible.

And I hope she does it without ever having to leave Alaska.

Obama, meanwhile, missed a great opportunity when McCain told him if he were running against George Bush, Obama should have run against the president four years ago.

McCain’s comment was facetious. And Obama should have retorted: “Why didn’t you run, John?”

Speaking of John, let’s talk about Joe – the poor plumber guy from Ohio.

I don’t feel a whit sorry for Joe if he can’t get a loan to expand the business where he puts in 12-hour days of labor. Plumbers bill 100 to 200 bucks an hour, and I’m sure Old Joe is making a tidy sum off hapless homeowners like me. He's doing just fine compared to many Americans, and will get all the money he needs once the Bush administration's banking meltdown ends.

He’s Joe the Plumber in my book, not Average Joe Sixpack.

(I know, I shouldn’t have said that. Next time the toilet goes blooooey, I’m gonna pay bigtime.)

Which reminds me, it’s time to get the septic tank pumped out.

Politics has filled it to overflowing.

History Lesson

Old Republican playbooks
haunt American politics

Question: What do William R. Horton and Spiro T. Agnew have in common?

Answer: Their political ghosts are riding high in the 2008 presidential election campaign.

Horton was serving life without parole in Massachusetts for the 1974 robbery-murder of a 17-year-old gas station attendant when he was given a weekend furlough, and didn’t bother to return. Ten months later, in 1987, he was arrested after the rape of a Maryland woman and attack on her fiancé that got Horton a double-life term. (He’s still behind bars in Maryland, as far as I know.)

Horton’s prison release was possible because of an inmate furlough program being extended to killers by a court decision. The Massachusetts legislature then passed a bill to prohibit furloughs for killers, only to see it vetoed by Gov. Michael Dukakis.

Yup, that guy – Dukakis, who beat Al Gore and Jessie Jackson, among others, to win the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. (Gary Hart was in that battle, too, until he was caught up in a sex scandal – belatedly prompting a Muckie nod of recognition at the 2008 mess of John Edwards.)

The Republicans and their 1988 nominee, George H.W. Bush, seized on the case, and the specter of “Willie” Horton dominated the campaign. And it didn’t help Dukakis’ chances when he offered a wimpy answer to the famous presidential debate question posed by moderator Bernard Shaw – that if wife Kitty “were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

These days, it’s easier to remember Willie Horton than the name of loser Michael Dukakis. Such is the power of a pounding negative campaign theme.

Agnew was the first-term Republican governor of Maryland whose criticism of black leaders during the 1968 King assassination rioting led to his unlikely selection as running mate in the successful presidential campaign of Richard M. Nixon.

As vice president, Agnew became Nixon’s attack dog, a specialist in delivering scripted negative rhetoric that included the famous description of the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” (He was also a crook – and avoided prison in 1973 by resigning the vice presidency and pleading no contest to evading income taxes on the bribes he got as governor. Agnew died in 1996.)

All this history brings us to 2008, and a first-term (Alaska) Republican governor and “hockey mom” unexpectedly named as the running mate of John McCain.

Attack dog? As she so famously (and unoriginally) put it, the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull is lipstick.

So no surprise, it’s Gov. Sarah Palin hammering in speech after speech about the Willie Horton of 2008 – Barack Obama’s supposed “terrorist pal” William Ayers.

So far, she hasn’t renamed him Willie.

What does this teach us? The Republicans are digging deep into old playbooks, looking for tactics to distract voters from the very real and frightening issues of the day – including a divisive war and a collapsing economy.

No matter that William Ayers’ transgressions played out four decades ago, as a founder of the violent Weather Underground – likely the most dangerous of the many protest groups formed to oppose the Vietnam War – or that his relationship with Obama is relatively minimal. It includes their simultaneous service on the board of an anti-poverty organization in Chicago, where Ayers became a college professor and respected member of the community.

McCain, as noted in an earlier Real Muck blog posting, is still hung up about Vietnam and victory as America seems snared in another winless war.

Bill Ayers? He’s the fall guy.

Some will say that Ayers deserves it.

But Obama doesn’t.

Neither does America.

McCain-Obama II

John McCain: You need a friend,
but please stop calling on me

Let’s get this out of the way: John McCain is not my friend. I’ve never met the man, and he certainly does not know me.

Neither is Barack Obama my friend. He doesn’t know me, either – but at least does not pretend to be my friend.

I don’t trust people who use the word “friend” over and over again, and sound like a used car dealer trying to unload a clunker on a naive shopper. An old used car dealer, whose slick is wearing thin.

If I had to choose, I’d want Obama as a friend. But I’ll settle for giving him my vote – as the winner of Tuesday night’s debate and for president.

Obama could have done better. There were responses I wanted him to give to some of the questions, and mistakes that made me wince – especially pulling Delaware banking laws out of the political closet as an unfortunate metaphor in addressing a lack of requirements for health insurers in some states.

It might be true, but hey – the Republicans lately had not been going back to allegations of Joe Biden being cozy with Delaware-based bank/credit card companies. That’ll change as Election Day nears.

I enjoyed the spectacle of McCain dropping a line that many in the audience had probably used eBay – this from a candidate who has never even learned to email. So the work of his writers was transparent – it was just a line fed to McCain to make him sound current.

He’s not current. He’s the past. It was apparent from McCain’s repetitive answers that he’s still fighting the Vietnam war. He still thinks the only way out is victory, when there may be no such thing in Iraq any more than there was in Vietnam. Not for America, and not for Iraq after we went in and busted up the place so badly for the sake of regime change.

George W. Bush talked a few months ago about establishing a “time horizon” for getting out. One thing about the horizon – you never get there. And McCain doesn’t even have the horizon in sight.