I said I was going to let the universe decide whether I’d be taking the Badger home, and the universe said: No. The ship was sold out for cars, although I could have hopped aboard as a plain old human being. Unwilling to tow my Subaru across Lake Michigan in a dinghy, however, I had to drive home, but that is fine. It meant two hours or so of WXRT on the radio, and I defied Google’s suggestion that I take I-294 through the west suburbs, opting instead for I-94 through the city. It meant some delays, but nothing head-hurting. The Chicago skyline is my very favorite, and definitely worth a few minutes sitting in sludge.

Then a stop at Redamak’s in New Buffalo for a greasy-burger lunch, and another in west Michigan for fruit, and it was a very tolerable 6.5 hours behind the wheel.

It was great to see old friends; we’ve been separated too long. I only wish it hadn’t been so dang humid.

And now I’m back home, living in chaos, as we wait for the floor-refinishers to get here. In the interim Alan has been doing work in the room, so it’s not like we’re sitting here like lumps. But Alan hates the guest-room bed and I hate the fact that some of my clothes are here and some are there and some are god-knows-where. The dressers are crammed into my office room, and everything behind them is unreachable. I have two pairs of earrings to wear — a tragedy, I know — but one of the consolations of being, um, older is that you know where all your shit is, and you generally have it together. Not now.

OK, so while I consider how I want to spend the rest of the day, have some bloggage:

Say what you will about Beto, but he knows how to seize the moment.

I imagine the Trump inner circle these days being something like the last third of “The Departed,” where Leo DiCaprio is essentially shitting himself from stress over being a rat.

I read little nonfiction in book form, because I spend all day in a firehose of nonfiction in my work life, but this book sounds like it might be worth a visit to the library, whenever it arrives:

“Thank You for Your Servitude” concentrates less on the MAGA true believers — the likes of Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene — than on the twisted and tormented souls in the Republican establishment who could have prevented Trump’s hostile takeover of the party but didn’t. Such Republicans, in Leibovich’s assessment, “made Trump possible” and they “refused to stop him even after the U.S. Capitol fell under the control of some madman in a Viking hat. It was always rationalization followed by capitulation and then full surrender. The routine was always numbingly the same, and so was the sad truth at the heart of it: They all knew better.”

So why did they go along? The usual Washington factors of greed, ambition and opportunism, for starters. Kevin McCarthy, who unwisely spoke to Leibovich at length and with considerable candor, made clear he would endure any humiliation at Trump’s hands and sacrifice any principle in pursuit of becoming House speaker. “Once McCarthy wins,” in Leibovich’s view, “nothing else matters: He will have made it.” Senator Lindsey Graham turned from Trump critic to lapdog out of a desire “to try to be relevant,” he told Leibovich, as well as a pragmatic understanding that his re-election depended upon Trump’s blessing and his base. Others submitted out of both fear and fascination; Leibovich notes the mystique that Trump, as “a pure and feral rascal,” held for rule-bound, easily shamed politicians.

Oy, these people.

OK, half of Thursday, Friday and the weekend await. Enjoy yours, and I’ll be back Sunday-ish.

Hello from Milwaukee. Sorry for the long absence. I’ve been taking a little me-time, another mini-driving tour to see long-missed friends. First stop, after recovering from working until 4 a.m. election night, Chicago.

Oh, and the tl;dr on election night: Long but surprisingly un-hectic. It was a primary, after all. Only one GOP challenger was ejected, and lo, he made a fuss about it, but ultimately, very quiet. But it ran until 4:30 a.m., so Wednesday was a walking-into-walls kinda day. Thursday, though, it was off to Chicago, to see the Borden/Connor Co-Prosperity Sphere. We had a good time. Went to the Nick Cave show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, saw Kate play at the Empty Bottle, wilted in the heat.

Had cocktails here:

It’s a retro cocktail lounge that is truly retro — that is, unchanged over decades, not reconstructed based on someone’s snarky memories.

Saturday it was off to Milwaukee, to crash with Deb and Mike for a couple days. Fewer pictures here, but it’s been very relaxing, hiding from killer humidity in the a/c. We did venture out to the farmers market. A very fun gang was selling…spring rolls, I believe, with this offer:

I could totally do a one-minute plank, but didn’t want to show off. Also, we didn’t need spring rolls, and it was so, so hot.

I’m keeping this short because my laptop battery is dying, and there’s fresh hummus on the counter. Tomorrow, I’m going to let the universe decide whether to take the S.S. Badger home to Michigan. If tickets are available in the morning, it’s a go. Otherwise, just another very long drive.

Back midweek. Hope your summer is going as well as the Summer of Nance.

Does it ever stop with houses? Ever? I’ll give you an example:

Our central air-conditioning unit is…old. When we moved in 17 years ago, the house inspector said he couldn’t give us an opinion on the A/C because a) it was the dead of winter; and b) the unit appeared old enough that it was nearing the end of its useful life. OK, fine, noted.

So every summer since, I’ve crossed my fingers as the weather heats up, hoping it will turn on and work. We had it inspected a few years ago; the guy took a couple of big mouse nests out of it and said it was down a…pound? I think that’s the unit?…of freon, but he wouldn’t add any because “it’s so old, it’s not worth it.”

It kept working. Finally, this year, I said maybe we should look into replacing it. I googled “life span of a central air conditioning unit” and learned the average one lasts about 12-15 years. And we’ve been here 17 years. And it was old when we moved in. So we called some companies and the parade of estimates is starting. In preparation, Alan went out to trim the shrubs around the unit and found the installation date on it: 1988. It’s 34 years old.

But it still works! It’s a goddamn miracle.

So the first guy shows up, goes downstairs to look at the furnace and says nope, won’t fit. The newer, high-efficiency A/C units are taller, and our furnace is too tall for it to sit on top, and so that means that to replace the A/C, we also need to replace the furnace (installed in 1998). So what started as a roughly $4,000 expense is now a $8,300 expense.

So, pfft. I’m thinking I’ll just wait until it finally goes kaput, knowing it will do so on a beastly hot day and who knows, maybe it’ll cost more.

Although three more quotes are coming our way, so maybe we’ll get a miracle. Let’s hope so.

Houses. It never stops.

Personal whining notwithstanding, it wasn’t a terrible weekend. Got some work done, got some socializing done, got some cooking done. But let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about Ivana Trump’s grave:

I don’t think enough attention has been paid to the incredible weirdness of this — to be buried on your second ex-husband’s golf course? At the time — a whole week ago — the discussion was about how the Catholic church had to consecrate the land so “strict Catholic” Ivana (who was married four times) could be buried there. And now it turns out there may have been an ulterior motive? You don’t say!

Looks like Melania did the landscaping there. Seriously, they didn’t even have some sod laid down? Good lord, these people.

Oh well, the week ahead looks good. Hope it does for you. Election Tuesday.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to buy a lottery ticket for the Mega Millions drawing. Probably depends on whether I’m in a vendor’s business before Friday’s drawing. I will do so from time to time, never more than $3 worth, maybe $5. A friend of mine says, “What does a dream cost?” And as everyone else says, “You gotta play to win.”

Imagine winning that much money. I’d take the lump sum of course, and try to keep my name as quiet as possible. Soon you’d see some changes around here, though. I’d bestow large sums on my friends and family members, of course. Do some fun stuff, like…charter a private jet to some fabulous destination and invite cool people to come aboard. Buy Alan a bigger boat, or maybe a house on a great trout stream. Give lots to charity. (If all these things happen, you’ll know I won.) And I would, of course, set up some sort of trust to keep the pile away from moochers.

Like? Oh, like the Rev. Leroy Jenkins.

You Central Ohioans of a certain age remember Leroy, as shifty and grifty a preacher as ever stood in a pulpit, although for some reason I don’t know that he was much for pulpits – he was the kind of guy who preached in drive-ins. His Wikipedia entry is a font of hilarity:

Jenkins was known for his faith healing, through the use of “miracle water”. In 2003, while based in Delaware, Ohio, Jenkins’ “miracle water,” drawn from a well on the grounds of his 30-acre religious compound known as the Healing Waters Cathedral, was found to contain coliform bacteria by the Ohio Department of Agriculture. Jenkins claimed tests conducted by independent laboratories all found the water safe for drinking and that the state ignored his findings. Jenkins was later fined $200 because he didn’t have a license to sell the water.

More? Sure:

In 1979, Jenkins was convicted in Greenwood, South Carolina, of conspiracy to assault two men and of plotting the arson of two homes. Jenkins was sentenced to 20 years in prison, with eight years suspended, for the incident. In 1994, he was arrested for grand theft, but the charges were soon dropped when he agreed to pay restitution.

What does he have to do with the lottery? Only this:

In 2001, his marriage to a 77-year-old widow, a black woman who had recently hit the Ohio Lottery jackpot for $6,000,000, was annulled by a judge in Delaware, Ohio. The legal guardian of Eloise Thomas, whose husband had died just three weeks before the marriage to Jenkins, former Ohio state senator Ben Espy, claimed on behalf of the woman’s family that Thomas was incompetent and therefore incapable of knowing what she was doing when she attempted to marry Jenkins. Jenkins has repeatedly denied accusations that he was attempting to marry the woman for the sake of her net worth, which was estimated at $4,000,000.

That was an amazing story. As I recall, the woman was in a wheelchair, and Leroy was a good decade younger, although it was hard to tell, as he was one of those men who kept his hair Elvis-black until the very end. Ben Espy, the woman’s lawyer/guardian, was a former OSU football star and Columbus city councilman who lost a leg sometime in the ’80s, when the cornice of a building downtown abruptly gave way and fell onto the street below, where Espy was unfortunately walking. What a day that was in the ol’ newsroom.

Anyway, that was the kind of stunt that, shall we say, led the good reverend’s obituary when he died in 2017. Columbus Monthly did a pretty good later-in-life profile called “Leroy Jenkins starts over,” with a detail most forgot: The wedding was performed in Las Vegas. Naturally.

I will not be marrying Leroy, or any of his kin, should I claim the prize.

Now to lay low for a few days. Covid is tearing through my community again, and as I am still a Novid, so to speak, I absolutely do not want to get it. Election is next week and I’m hitting the road for a little driving trip afterward. I’ll be packing masks and tests and staying outdoors as much as possible. Have a great weekend, however you are testing at the moment, and I’ll be back toward the end of it.

Swimming in the St. Clair River Tuesday was everything I needed it to be. The thermometer passed 90 when we arrived, and after the usual sunscreening and locking up the wallets and phones and all that, we made our way down to the water. Went in slow, then fast.

The water temperature was about 65 degrees. And after the initial OMG THIS IS COLD, it was absolutely perfect. We did two drift-downs, from the most upstream ladder on the seawall to the downstream one, climbed out, walked back and did it again. This was followed by a drink and a snack at the Voyageur, and of course in between there was lots of discussion of current events, mutual friends and war stories.

It was glorious. Go swimming in this heat, if it’s available to you. It’ll do you good.

Today, however, was beastly hot, and it will continue to be so all weekend. Me no likey. Nobody likeys. As I have said before, it might as well be minus-9, in terms of its effect on your movements (and energy use, ahem). So I’m hunkered down for now.

On that topic, and speaking of the Voyageur, i.e., the restaurant we went to after our swim, we wanted to have a drink on the patio. But the patio was closed because of the heat. Also, there were only two cooks and hardly any wait staff, along with signs posted everywhere asking guests to be patient. This seems late in the pandemic for staffing shortages, but there you are. A million people died, and not all of them were 85 years old.

More short shrift today, but I’m interested in the hearings later, and am preoccupied with other things. Here’s a fresh thread. Enjoy.

Sorry for the late update today. Got back from Indiana late yesterday afternoon and just ran out of gas. I made a speedy, 30-hour visit to the Hoosier state and, well. You know how it is.

The old burg looks great (in places) and less-so (in other places). Downtown is shining like a gem. New buildings, new construction going up, and a new riverfront park (from the last time I was there, anyway). Meanwhile, the shopping centers that bustled when I was there all look tired and used up. Fort Wayne Newspapers looks like absolute shit; I expect the new owners are just biding their time until they can swing the wrecking ball. And having killed the paper I once worked for, they didn’t even have the decency to take the name off the building:

Probably because it might cost them a few bucks.

But it was a good visit. Stayed with Alex and Harry in northern Allen County Saturday night, then swung down into town for a quick lunch with others before hauling back out.

And now we’re into another week-long stretch of miserable heat, but that just means…it’s time to go ottering. Planning a quick pop up to the St. Clair River tomorrow, in fact. Supposed to be 90 outside, but 65 degrees water temperature. We’ll see how that goes.

I just watched the first two parts of the Victoria’s Secret docs-series on Hulu. It’s as bad — the situation, not the series — as you’d imagine, and Les Wexner is not coming off well at all. I don’t expect that bothers him; he’s past 80 now and no one lives forever. But if I were one of his four children, carrying his name and just starting out in life, it wouldn’t be a good feeling.

New thread, and I’ll gain some energy as the week goes on. At least, I hope so. I’m laying low in case I caught a case in the Hoosier state; Covid is running wild again, and virtually no one was wearing a mask. Never change, Indiana.

When Alan was features editor in Fort Wayne, he had an intern one summer with a shall-we-say-foundational problem. She had no real instinct for a story.

One in particular sticks in my memory. A new freeway bypass was being constructed at the time, and of course it included many overpasses. When those are built, the ‘dozers pile up a lot of earth, leaving holes in the ground that become stormwater retention ponds. You’ve driven past approximately a million of these in your lifetime. In this case, one of the property owners whose land abutted this project had a dream, and worked out a deal with the highway department to make the retention pond near him just a little bit bigger, big enough to be the minimum size required to accommodate that dream: To host sanctioned water-skiing competitions. In that very pond.

I believe he had landed his first event, nothing Cypress Gardens-level, but still: A sanctioned water-skiing competition! In a freeway retention pond, the boats tracing extremely tight triangular patterns, with the traffic screaming by! Now there’s a story.

The intern could not be convinced. “It’s just a guy with a pond in his back yard,” she argued. “So he’s going to run a boat around on it. Big deal.”

I don’t think Alan won that one, and didn’t try to — any story written by any reporter who couldn’t see the humor and absurdity in that situation would be stillborn. But I thought about her when I read the comments on a short aggregation/rewrite I did for Deadline, of a charming story written for the Freep by my ottering friend Bill. He freelances a regular feature called Free Press Flashback, which is pretty self-explanatory. Sunday’s was on the time the city police department rolled out the red carpet for a Hollywood movie production, and the ensuing film, “Detroit 9000,” turned out to be a piece of crap:

A Black congressman from Detroit announces his run for Michigan governor in the ballroom of the Book Cadillac Hotel. After he collects $400,000 for his campaign in money and jewels from Black supporters, a group of masked robbers cleverly steals the loot.

That bold caper is the opening scene in “Detroit 9000,” the low-budget tire squealer that made big headlines in 1973. Hyped as the first locally filmed feature movie, it ended up embarrassing city officials and local celebrities who had fallen hard for Hollywood’s promise to splash the glories of Detroit across the silver screen.

After allowing filmmakers to use police assets from headquarters to horses, Mayor Roman Gribbs blasted the production team as “a garbage organization that produced a garbage movie.”

The police commissioner got a bit part, for which he will win no acting awards. Local celebrities got similar roles and walk-ons. And were rewarded with a film whose marketing line called their city “the murder capital of the world” — “where honkies are the minority race.”

It’s a funny story. Here are a few of the Facebook reactions:

So why bring it up?

Ya I know all about it. Do we really need to re live every one of these moments?? Certainly things are different now?

So.. Michigan is doomed, if all our media sources keep bringing up past filth and horrors. We’ve got to get past these garbage racist viewpoints. It’s too decisive and all it does is make this place slow and miserable.

Sigh. It must be terrible to go through life without a sense of humor. Like not being able to smell. Although I have to say, I’ve known reporters like that. Give them the job of writing about “Detroit 9000,” and they’d spend six paragraphs noting that a $400,000 fundraiser, in 1973, would be the equivalent of $2.6 million today, and that’s totally unrealistic for a single state-level function, plus it would be against the law to accept jewelry in lieu of cash.

I’m reading “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison, because some state senator concerned about Dirty Books is hooked up with some people who want it out of school libraries. It’s a Morrison novel I had not yet read, so I thought I might see what the fuss is about. The problem is a scene depicting the incestuous rape of an 11-year-old. It made me recall my high-school English teacher assigning Maya Angelou’s memoir “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” in which the 8-year-old Maya is also raped. My teacher was a very prim and proper old-school sort, but she did not shrink from the horror of those passages, and we had a very serious classroom discussion about them.

Perhaps this is why I grew up to be a Democrat. I was forced to read dirty books.

“The Bluest Eye” is a masterpiece, step one on Morrison’s path to the Nobel Prize. I pity the idiots who see it solely as obscenity. I wonder what they read for recreation, if they read at all. I guess the Left Behind novels had to sell to someone.

Hope all had a good weekend, with lots of recreational reading.

One of the things I read, not for recreation, was the New York Times’ Haiti project:

(F)or generations after independence, Haitians were forced to pay the descendants of their former slave masters, including the Empress of Brazil; the son-in-law of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I; Germany’s last imperial chancellor; and Gaston de Galliffet, the French general known as the “butcher of the Commune” for crushing an insurrection in Paris in 1871.

The burdens continued well into the 20th century. The wealth Ms. Present’s ancestors coaxed from the ground brought wild profits for a French bank that helped finance the Eiffel Tower, Crédit Industriel et Commercial, and its investors. They controlled Haiti’s treasury from Paris for decades, and the bank eventually became part of one of Europe’s largest financial conglomerates.

…How is it possible, many ask, that Haiti shares an island with the Dominican Republic, with its underground subway system, health care coverage, public schools, teeming resorts and impressive stretches of economic growth?

Corruption is the usual explanation, and not without reason: Haiti’s leaders have historically ransacked the country for their own gain, legislators have spoken openly on the radio about accepting bribes and oligarchs sit atop lucrative monopolies, paying few taxes. Transparency International ranks it among the most corrupt nations in the world.

But another story is rarely taught or acknowledged: The first people in the modern world to free themselves from slavery and create their own nation were forced to pay for their freedom yet again — in cash.

I knew nothing of this history, and I found the whole package fascinating. I checked Twitter for the reaction and found it to be, shall we say, derisive:

"Historians say"; "leading historians"; "documents rarely reviewed by historians". The @nytimes stood on the backs of researchers of Haiti and the Caribbean who mostly aren't in the story but are relegated to another tiny link. Scholars deserve recognition.https://t.co/ic2iGN9DgN

— Rebecca Shapiro (@RebeccaJShapiro) May 21, 2022

OK, fine. Sorry I brought it up. Man, people are so damn touchy.

I guess that’s all. Do yourself a favor and read a dirty book today.

The involuntary manslaughter case against James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of the Oxford school shooter (this was last fall, in November, and I know it’s hard to keep them straight these days), continues to grind on. Preliminary hearing after preliminary hearing, we get to see the couple, still being held in the county lockup, sit in court and hear details of the case against them.

The latest was Thursday. Here’s what they’re asking:

James and Jennifer Crumbley also don’t want the jury to hear about their alleged affairs, pot smoking or drinking habits, horse hobby or messy house — all of which has been raised by prosecutors. None of that is relevant to their case, argue their lawyers, who filed five blistering motions with the court late Thursday in which they blasted Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald over her handling of the case, accused her of trying to smear their clients and taint the jury pool by disclosing inflammatory information, and sought to derail the prosecution case.

The “also” is because the lede of the story was that their son had written in his journal — found in his backpack after the shooting — that he hoped his act would result in the impeachment of “Sleepy Joe Biden.” The Crumbleys are afraid their family’s unified Let’s-Go-Brandon politics might influence the jury.

But the “messy house” was the detail that pierced me. I’ve probably mentioned it here about a thousand times, that while my house will occasionally get more cluttered than I like, it’s very very rarely so awful that I would be embarrassed to have someone else walk through it. I vacuum and dust on the regular, and the thought of a pizza box sitting on my coffee table for longer than 10 minutes makes me shudder. I can just imagine what their place looked like, to have the prosecutor mention it in court documents. And then they bought their weirdo 15-year-old boy a handgun. GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY.

Anyway, that’s my prejudice.

Sorry for the scant updates this week. I just took a very leisurely stroll with Wendy and tried to let the calm of the morning penetrate me. I didn’t sleep well last night, and skipped the morning swim. I should do that more often — the calm-infusion part, that is. My pandemic funk deepened over the winter, and hasn’t entirely lifted, even though we’re doing more to get away from the rut we dug for ourselves in the last two years. (Not eating out as much, though — restaurant prices just keep climbing here, and the $50-plus-tip I paid for the last two-bar-cheeseburgers-and-two-beers meal suddenly doesn’t seem worth it.)

And our financial positions have taken a hit, but I’ve ridden the stock-market roller coaster long enough that I’m not too worried. We’re still taking another long trip this fall. Most likely to Spain, so tips and advice are welcome. Madrid and Barcelona will be the home bases; the south is tempting, but every day spent moving between cities is a lost day, so.

I’m an empty cup today, I know. Sorry about that. So I fall back on the Midwesterner’s old faithful parting: Gonna be a hot one today. You turnin’ on that AC?

ON EDIT: Some bloggage that won’t make anyone feel better:

A Virginia lawyer is suing Barnes & Noble for selling a book he disapproves of.

The guy who sold the Buffalo shooter his weapon doesn’t feel guilty, no, why would you ask:

Even if Robert Donald were the rare 75-year-old who watches livestreams on Twitch, he would not have known that the video broadcasting at around 2:30 p.m. on Saturday had anything to do with him. The footage was from a camera attached to a person’s head and showed their point of view as they got out of a car, made their way through the parking lot into a Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo, and started shooting people with an assault rifle. Donald would not have recognized the Bushmaster XM-15 he sold earlier this year, partly because it had been modified to hold more ammo and a racial slur had been painted on the barrel. “I know I didn’t do anything wrong,” Donald told the New York Times, explaining that he did not even remember the person who bought the rifle. “But I feel terrible about it.”

Pennsylvania people: What’s going to happen in the gubernatorial race? Does Mastriano have a chance against Fetterman?

And with that, have a nice weekend. Ha.

This weekend — today, Sunday — is the Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere’s 29th wedding anniversary. While we’re beyond the “Gone Girl” tributes, it’s always nice to mark a milestone appropriately, so we had a 24-hour getaway.

To St. Clair, Michigan, previously known as the place where Nancy and her friend Bill go ottering in high-to-late summer. Just north of Palmer Park there, where we otter, is the St. Clair Inn. It was once a highfalutin vacation spot for swells (Bill spent his first honeymoon night there, once upon a time), then fell on hard times, then went through a lengthy, oft-delayed renovation, and reopened only recently as a swank hotel. We booked a room there for Saturday. River view, of course — what’s the point of going to St. Clair if you can’t watch the freighters go by?

That’s the…I forget which one that was. Wait, lemme zoom in… OK, it’s the Federal Columbia, a bulk carrier, upbound. A salty, which is what they call the ships that leave the Great Lakes for open ocean. We saw at least a dozen, a few of them thousand-footers like the Edmund Fitzgerald. The Federal Columbia is headed for Burns Harbor, in Indiana. Got a ways to go, but I bet it’s closer than I think.

The St. Clair River drains Lake Huron, into Lake St. Clair, then Erie, Ontario and out to sea. It’s blue, and it runs at a clip.

The bar in the Inn is called the Dive, and this sculpture outside pays tribute to the end-of-season tradition from the old days, where the wait staff would go for a swim themselves. My man on the right has about a second to correct his position before he does a bellyflop.

Today, it was a slow drive down the riverfront, through Algonac to the northern coast of Lake St. Clair, then the long way home. A whole trip that felt like a mini-vacation, and we used less than a quarter of a tank.

Of course you can’t get entirely away, and the news intruded. Another goddamn mass shooting, because we gotta have one of those every so often. Otherwise we might not have Freedom.

Bloggage: If you haven’t read this, from the Atlantic, about “how politics poisoned the evangelical church,” it’s worth your time.

Oh, and look — another mass shooting. This one…at a church. Kinda fitting.

Years ago, when I was younger, callow and a lazy newspaper columnist, I opened my mail one morning and a story fell into my lap.

The letter was from a former resident of the Pixley Home, a long-closed child welfare agency in Fort Wayne. Back in the day, if you lacked the resources to support your own children, you didn’t get cash or food stamps or other help from the government. Rather, the government would take over the care and raising of your children in a place like the Pixley Home, sort of an orphanage for children who weren’t orphans. This woman’s time at Pixley was sometime in the ’30s or ’40s, when the Depression, and then the war, disrupted many families. Kids at Pixley might have only one parent, often a widower father but sometimes a woman who had no family of her own to help with her burden. Child care outside of a grandmother or aunt was virtually nonexistent, so if you had to work to support yourself and had no one to watch your children? You surrendered them to a place like the Pixley Home.

If it sounds cruel to you, you’re not the only one.

Parents could visit their children, of course, on Sundays. And parents could get their children back, once they were back on their feet. I don’t recall what the process was to reclaim them, but I do know children generally stayed for months or years.

Anyway, the woman who wrote was trying to put together a reunion of Pixley kids, and hoped I could publicize it. I dug up a picture of the old building, called a few of the other residents that she had already tracked down, and wrote a column describing this merry, loving place, because that’s how my correspondent remembered it. She described it as something out of Little Orphan Annie, with stern-but-kind caretakers, big group dinners and so forth. It was like having a couple dozen brothers and sisters, all sleeping in dorms and bunk beds. About the worst thing she remembered was the weekly dose of castor oil everyone had to take.

The column ran, a few more Pixley kids were found as a result, the reunion went as planned and then, a few weeks after that, another letter arrived.

Like the first, it was written by an older woman. Only her memories of the Pixley Home were very different. She described a particular delivery man who would hang around after he’d offloaded his groceries and find a way to corner her in a quiet place. You can imagine what happened next. She certainly hadn’t forgotten it. She said she told the matrons about him, but nothing was done. It’s safe to say that decades later, she was still pretty upset about it. She certainly didn’t want to go to a happy reunion, and didn’t. But she wanted me to know.

Jeff has written about this elsewhere, and he’s right: Sexual abuse of children and women is absolutely nothing new, and was far, far more widespread than any of us know. My Fort Wayne neighbor’s mother-in-law was profoundly deaf from birth, and it happened to her. If you wanted a perfect victim, why not choose a girl who couldn’t talk? Or a girl in an institution? Or a servant or other low-status worker with no power and few resources to fight back?

The good ol’ days weren’t, in other words.

I thought of this other Pixley girl a couple years ago, when a father in one of the Larry Nassar sentencing hearings lunged at the defendant, calling him a son-of-a-bitch and asking for “one minute alone,” etc. He was subdued by deputies before he laid a hand on Nassar. So now his daughter, molested by Nassar at 13, has to further deal with the sight of her father being taken from the courtroom in handcuffs.

I want to tentatively raise my hand and ask a question: Is it possible to acknowledge every one of Nassar’s victims, to let them speak and describe how they were hurt by him, and still give them what they need to live the rest of their lives, not as victims, but as survivors? Because as creepy as having some doctor stick his ungloved fingers in you might be, having that define the rest of your life is far, far worse.

All of these stories are terrible, and some are unendurable. A father whose guilt over not protecting his daughter drove him to suicide. A victim who committed suicide herself.

When I read that ESPN piece about Todd Hodne, the rapist who played briefly at Penn State, I was struck by…well, by so many things. But what elevated it, in my eyes, was the careful attention paid to what happened to the women after they were raped by this behemoth. The girl who, at 16, successfully fended him off found strength in what she’d done, strength that has buttressed her throughout her life. Betsy Sailor, the woman who tried so hard through her terror to remember every detail, so she could testify later in court, similarly carried that good-deed-that-came-of-a-terrible-one into how she lived. Others were broken, or nearly so, by what happened. One woman remembered her mother, a Hodne victim, and the anxiety she was never able to shake afterward.

Of course you can’t blame those who didn’t turn straw into gold; no one knows how they’ll come through a trauma until it happens.

I was also struck, reading the Hodne story, that we’re finally getting better at how we treat women (and men) who endure these crimes. Victim impact statements are only part of it. We obviously have far, far to go. But there’s a glimmer of a bright side to look on, at least sometimes.

I don’t want to bring y’all down today, but the Pixley Home has been knocking around my head for a while now, and it needed to come out.

Bloggage?

In Michigan, the state GOP continues to delaminate. The guy in that story is deep in the DeVos organization, as I recall, and if he’s out, well, Katy bar the door.

If you were wondering if there’s a worse businessman in the world than Donald Trump, I do believe we’ve found him:

Boeing should have rejected then-President Donald Trump’s proposed terms to build two new Air Force One aircraft, the company’s CEO said Wednesday.

Dave Calhoun spoke Wednesday on the company’s quarterly earnings call, just hours after Boeing disclosed that it has lost $660 million transforming two 747 airliners into flying White Houses.

Then-President Trump, an aviation enthusiast, took a keen interest in the new presidential jets, involving himself in everything from contract negotiations to the plane’s color scheme. As part of the deal, Boeing signed a fixed-price contract that required the company, not taxpayers, to pay for any cost overruns during the complicated conversion of the two airliners.

Then-Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who was dismissed in December 2019, personally negotiated the Air Force One terms with Trump at the White House and the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

P.S. Dennis Muilenberg left his “dismissal” with a $62 million exit package.