MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Disclaimer:  everything contained in this blog is MY OPINION.  Every attempt is made to present the truth through actual facts or to identify statements which are in doubt;  otherwise there will be no deliberate presentation of gossip, rumor, or innuendo which can't be proven as factual.

Due to considerable demands on my time, this blog is discontinued.  It may resume at a later date, but at the moment there are no plans to do that in the foreseeable future.

Christmases are different all over the world.  We spent a lot of them in non-Christian countries.
Malta, being Catholic, celebrated all the religious holidays with great fanfare.  Christmas there was almost the best I've seen anywhere, although early Electra, London, and Elko, Nevada are definitely in the running. However,  Malta celebrated on every level:  realistic marzipan fruit and flower decorations at the bakery, wax figures of the Christ child displayed in the front windows of homes, shops, no matter how small, with tinsel and lights, songs and enormous religious displays, yule logs, bright cellophane Christmas trees, cotton snow everywhere, a composite representation of all the nationalities that had been in Malta from time to time. It went on for the entire month of December, and it was beautiful.
In non-Christian countries, the people knew that foreigners celebrated that day, and although they didn't understand it, they respected it.  They knew that it equaled gifts, both given and received, and in most cases, given on our part, especially in the Arab countries.
However, when we were in Libya, Haj Mohammed, the man with whom I traded, knew something was up with Christmas.  It puzzled him a bit, because there was no Moslem celebration of Yesu (our Jesus), a minor prophet, but he was willing to go along with whatever we wanted to do.
We had somehow lost our poisonous green cellophane tree that we'd had in Malta, and there were none available in Tripoli.  My husband asked Haj if he could get us a tree.  My husband spoke fluent formal Peninsular Arabic, but that's a good deal different from Saharan Arabic.  I spoke a bit of Maltese, which is somewhat kin to North African Arabic, and between the two of us, we thought Haj knew what we wanted.
He assured us that he could acquire the proper tree.
Several days later, I heard whooping and hollering and stepped out on the front porch to see what was going on.  Across the sand, completely ignoring the road, came a big black car with men and boys hanging out the windows banging on the doors and yelling. Haj was perched like a hood ornament on the front end, and a blocks-long rooster tail of dust was boiling up from the back.
It was Haj and his sons.  With a tree.  A really, really big tree.
It was a cypress, cut from one of the Italian farms' windbreaks, and it was probably 40 feet long.  The butt end of it was stuffed into the trunk, lashed so completely with ropes that it was impossible to tell what it was.  It looked like a gigantic ball of twine. Apart from the butt end of it, which was probably 6 feet in diameter including branches, the rest protruded maybe three car lengths behind.
The car came to a screeching halt in front of our gate and Haj leaped out with a lethal-looking curved dagger that was big enough to have cut the tree down-and probably had.  He proceeded to hack and slash at the ropes until the tree was loose.  His sons dragged it from the trunk onto the sand, where it landed with an ear (and branch) shattering thump, which brought everyone in the neighborhood to their front doors.
My husband, who had stood utterly bemused and silent, watching the whole operation, reached into his pocket like an automaton and gave Haj money.  Haj and his sons pounded each other on the shoulders, shouted "Mabruk!" (Felicitations) to us, and roared off back across the desert to celebrate.
We stared at the tree.  Suddenly it occurred to us that cutting a tree out of a windbreak was illegal. VERY illegal.  We yanked the tree through the gate and laid it sideways, where it crushed my carnations and stretched across the flowerbeds along the entire front of the house.  Finally my husband grabbed a saw and cut off about six feet from the bottom. He rolled it out the front gate, where it stood, like a huge ragged green doily against the wall.
Having done that, he maneuvered the base up the porch steps and told me to drag the tree into the house!
Struggling, sweating, and  saying words  which simply aren't Christmas-y in every language I knew, I got the tree into the hall.  It went from the front door past the living and dining rooms, the kitchen, a bedroom and the tip end came to rest against the back hall wall.
We set about dismembering it and trimming it down to a size that would fit under our 12 foot ceilings. Finally it measured to fit, and we managed to get it upright and nailed to several boards to support it.  We stood back to admire our accomplishment....
The tree was entirely denuded of branches right down to the trunk on one side.  The abrasive drag across 20 miles of desert had sanded it smooth.
Startled,  we turned it so that the bare side was toward the wall and the branched side faced the living room.  We decorated it lavishly, and I went to cook.  That evening, when guests were due for dinner, I opened the wooden floor-to-ceiling ghibli screen on the wide front windows and turned the lights on.
Our guests were laughing hilariously when they came in the front door.  I went outside to discover that while I was in the kitchen, my husband had painted the bare side red and white like a barber pole. I'm sure he intended it to be a candy cane or the North Pole, but it simply looked like a scraggley tree painted red and white.
It was a sight.
Apparently never to be forgotten, for as we travelled and met friends in other places at Christmas time, they never failed to remind us.  Face it:  we could never hope to top that Libyan Christmas tree.

Also never to be forgotten was the late news of the loss of Scottish, French,  and Italian cousins in WW II, and  the first Christmas my Uncle Ed was home.  He had been captured on Bataan and in a Japanese prison camp until the end of the war.  He weighed less than 100 pounds when he came home, but we were so glad to have him with us that after the initial shock, we ignored how he looked and concentrated on feeding him.  That was, perhaps, not a merry Christmas, but an intensely grateful one.

Anita Huguelet McMurtrie.

Mourning Becomes Electra

Disclaimer:   everything contained in this blog is MY OPINION.  Every attempt is made to present the truth through actual facts or to identify statements which are in doubt;  otherwise, there will be no deliberate presentation f gossip, rumor, or innuendo which can't be proven as factual.

IN MY OPINION;
Electra has degenerated into a lawless dictatorship.
It seems that various officials  have proven their disregard for the law and disrespect for the townspeople.  Apparently they are prepared to set themselves against everything but what they want and they are prepared to consider nothing else.
Facts are suppressed, words are manipulated, the law is ignored, townspeople are stonewalled.
But we are letting them get by with it.
It's too late for our police chief and our city park, to name two of the most glaring offenses, and the only legal way we can change all this, apart from hiring a shark of a lawyer or a determined campaign of passive resistance,  is to organize and elect people we can trust to support us and not indulge in the apparent rampant abuse of power we are now witnessing.

14.  Who is behind the push for Electra to become a microcosm of Washington DC?

Anita Huguelet McMurtrie

Our Wind Can Beat Your Wind!

Disclaimer:  everything contained in this blog is MY OPINION.  Every attempt is made to present the truth through actual facts or to identify statements which are in doubt; otherwise there will be no deliberate presentation of gossip, rumor, or innuendo which can't be proven as factual.

Years past, my family went to the Hudsons' every Christmas and the Robbs for New Years for decades.
Our gift to the Hudsons was a large decorative centerpiece which would be placed in the center of the dining table surrounded by the good china, crystal, and silver. The tree was decorated with real metal tinsel and lights made in Germany in the shape of dolls, nutcrackers, trees, candy canes, etc.
We would arrive early, and mid-afternoon, while the women cooked and gossiped in the kitchen and the men told tall tales in the living room, someone would take me to the Grand Theater to see a movie or a cartoon. Sometimes we were the only ones there. We'd get back just in time for eggnog and a sumptuous dinner.
New Years Eve was entirely different.  My mother always bought huge glass jars with patterns moulded into the glass, and filled with hard candy at Goldsmith's, and gave one to the Robbs for Christmas.  The jar would be open and displayed next to their fabulous pink net Christmas tree in one corner of the living room.  I loved that tree.  Dink and Violet were wonderful cooks, and Dink's famous punch would be at the end of the dining table, with a smaller bowl of it for kids.  I felt so grown up when I came home from college the first time for the holidays, and was allowed to have some of the REAL punch!
I'm glad to have had a childhood that included such traditional celebrations.

Towns used to really decorate at Christmas.  Tinsel-wrapped wreaths, candles, Santa faces, elves, trees, candy canes were attached to the tops of telephone and electric poles through downtown and often colored lights were strung across the streets. Lots of money was spent on the decorations, and they were carefully taken down after New Year's and packed away for the next year.
With the end of World War II, people were in the mood to be expansive and celebrate.  The city fathers decided to do something new and fancy with the street decorations.  Together with the chamber of commerce, they started looking for something every other town nearby would envy.
They decided on giant tinsel.  And it was expensive.  School kids went door to door collecting money and various sales and fund raisers were held.  About $3000 was eventually raised.
But this was not just ordinary tinsel. This was inch-wide, 5 inch long strips of aluminum. It would surely be the talk of the county! However, the sponsors were worried about the persistent wind here, and communicated their concern to the tinsel manufacturer. They were assured that this tinsel had been "tested in Chicago and survived!"
Since Chicago was far-famed at that time for being the windiest city in the USA, the city fathers thought the tinsel had passed  the acid test, and took what was then a great deal of money and bought it.  Yards and yards of it.
At Thanksgiving that year, the tinsel was hung in swags from the electrical and telephone poles across the downtown streets.  Here and there colored lights were reflected in a rainbow of Christmas colors.  It was lovely.
However, shoppers were soon greeted with a windstorm of aluminum strips.  Then stores started to experience mysterious electrical failures. It was a considerable puzzle until city workers discovered that a few of the wind torn strips were working their way through narrow slits in the metal covers of junction and relay boxes on top of the poles and shorting out the electricity.
After the initial annoyance at the tinsel's failure to hold up to the manufacturer's assurances, Electra became sort of proud: our wind had beat out Chicago's wind!

Anita Huguelet McMurtrie

Lest We Forget

Disclaimer:  everything contained in this blog is MY OPINION. Every attempt is made to present the truth through actual facts or to identify statements which are in doubt;  otherwise there will be no deliberate presentation of gossip, rumor, or innuendo which can't be proven as factual.

No, I am not stopping the blog because I've been threatened with retaliation-as if that would stop me anyway.  I am stopping it because the research and investigation into rumors and facts is very time-consuming, and because when I'm out of town, I can't verify those rumors and get the facts.

This is the little-known story of the USS Wake and a couple of my very distant relatives.
In 1926, the keel of a gunboat was laid down at Kiangnan Engineering and Dock Works in Shanghai, China.  Almost a year later in May 1927,  the ship was launched and named USS Guam.  Six months after that it was assigned to the South China Patrol.
For three years the Guam, along with the USS Tutuila and USS Panay patroled the Yangtze River in China from Shanghai to the above "The Three Gorges," along with British, French, and Japanese gunboats.
In 1930, the Chinese Civil War broke out and the Guam sailed to guard the safety of American missionaries and other foreigners in two Yangtze cities that were now in Communist hands. Near Yochow, the ship came under small arms fire and a seaman was killed.  The Guam fired its guns in anger for the first time.
The Japanese conquered and occupied Shanghai in October 1937, and as they advanced the Guam transfered Americans to Hankow. Still on Yangtze patrol, the Guam  was renamed the USS Wake*  because the name Guam was wanted for a new battle cruiser.
In response to dangerously deteriorating political conditions, on 7 November 1941, President Roosevelt ordered all river gunboats and the 4th US Marines to leave China, with the exception of the Marines and gunboats left to guard embassies and other diplomatic posts.
Three weeks later, Lieutenant Commander Andrew Harris, now in charge of the Wake sensed critical danger in Japanese orders for the ship to stay in Hankow.  He defied them and prepared to up anchor which brought the Japanese commander on board shrieking that the ship couldn't move unless it had a Japanese ship for escort.
The hubbub brought Lt. Cmdr Harris to the door of the pilot house from which he told the Japanese that unless he wanted a free trip to Shanghai, he'd better leave.
In  Shanghai, Harris and his crew, except for a 14 man skeleton crew, were transferred to larger gunboats which were to sail to the Philippines.  Out of the frying pan into the fire.
At this point, the Navy asked Columbus D. Smith a US naval reservist who had served in World War I and won the Navy Cross, to accept a commission. He was by now an Old China Hand, and had spent years piloting on the Yangtze.  He accepted the commission and became Lieutenant Commander Smith, commanding officer of the Wake. 
Still on the Yangtze, the Wake and its companion ship Tutuila (at Chunking, guarding the US Embassy there) were notified that  a typhoon was on the way.  The two flat-bottomed ships weren't considered seaworthy enough to weather the storm and cross the Formosa Straits to possible safety, so were effectively marooned in China.
The new commander and his 14 sailors were virtually abandoned.  In short, they were to be thrown to the wolves-in this case, the Japanese.
The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Wake was rigged to be scuttled by explosive charges set in strategic places.  The ship was to be destroyed, but it seemed there were no plans to evacuate or rescue the men.  The night before, Smith had received a call from a Japanese officer whom Smith knew.   The officer told him he wished to make a gift of turkeys to the ship and asked where Smith would be.  It came out later that the same trick was pulled on other Allied officers and officials to discover where they'd be located when the Japanese forces took over.
Smith was ashore when he was told of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He rushed to the Wake only to discover that although his crew had fought the Japanese and attempted to scuttle the ship, they had failed.
Smith didn't make it to his ship.  He was taken prisoner at the dock and presented to the Japanese commander, who was very upset that Smith's sword was on board the Wake.  He wanted a ceremonial surrender of Smith's sword so people could see that the Japanese navy followed protocol and treated its prisoners honorably (truth to tell, the public humiliation of Smith was probably uppermost in the Japanese commander's mind).
It was not to be.  The Japanese were forced to accept the Wake's commander's capitulation-swordless.
In consequence, the USS Wake was the only American ship to surrender during World War II.
Its commander and sailors were imprisoned under hideous circumstances at a Japanese concentration camp in Shanghai.
The surrendered Wake was taken into the Imperial Japanese Navy and named the Tatara.   On patrol for nearly four years with the Japanese, it was surrendered to Allied forces on 9 September 1945. Shortly thereafter, it was removed from the US Navy List.  In 1946, the Guam/Wake/Tatara was given to the Chinese Nationalist Party and named RCS Tai Yuan.  Three years later, it was captured by the People's Republic of China and served into the 1960s.

In 1944, Lt. Cmdr  Smith and two other POWs, a British Royal Navy commander and an American Marine, cut their way through their cell bars with a smuggled hacksaw blade.  Somehow managing to climb over the 25 foot wall surrounding their prison, they bluffed their way to safety across 700 miles of Japanese-held territory by pretending to be White Russians.

*Not to be confused with another ship, the USS Wake Island, a Casablanca class escort carrier built and launched in 1943.


Anita Huguelet McMurtrie

Goodbye, Farewell, So Long Forever.....

Disclaimer:  everything contained in this blog is MY OPINION.  Every attempt is made to present the truth through actual facts or to identify statements which are in doubt;  otherwise there will be no deliberate presentation of gossip, rumor, or innuendo which can't be proven as factual.

It could have been prevented.

Despite the laws concerning public parks and waterways and public opposition, the EISD continued to stick to the schedule to begin the destruction of our city park.
Why was everything proving the need for a school and their plans for the park not made public in the months before the vote?
Maybe because the supporters of the bond knew if the voters were aware of the threat to their park, the bond wouldn't pass.
Why were there no figures published concerning what updating the high school would cost as compared with the $11.5 million for the new school?
Perhaps because the sponsors of the bond knew the financially strapped people of Electra would respond better to emotional guilt trips than to a cheaper, more practical plan.
Why was a very small, blurry, and unclear plan for the park was printed AFTER the bond was voted in.?
It would seem, since a plan was produced immediately after the vote, that the bond backers already planned to destroy the park.
Why was the responsibility of an inquiry about the legality of the school accessing the park given only to the city attorney and not sent to Austin?
Was that not stupid?
Why was the Water Conservation Districts' ruling on watercourses ignored?
Possibly because the park plan would have been stopped dead.
And so it goes.  And goes.  And goes.  The city park is only the more recent example of the town's authorities' willful disregard for the wishes of the voters.
I'm not too proud of what I consider the unethical, dishonorable, manipulative way these authorities are doing business these days, but the destruction of the park is really the cherry on the sundae for me.
For the people we elected to represent us who went along with this scheme:  I will vote for you again only if the person running against you is the medical mafia candidate.  That includes not only the city commission, but the hospital board, the school board and any other position in which the public has a say.  I hope everyone else who has opposed the destruction of the park will have the guts to stand up and be counted at the next election.
For those who say "it won't do any good," agree because someone yells louder and longer, or "because my vote wasn't going to make any difference," and make other excuses for their cowardice and apathy,  here's my opinion:  these 'reasons' for voting-or not-are just chickenshit.  

13. Who steamrollers public opinion and overrides the law?

Anita Huguelet McMurtrie

Have a Hopeful and Bountiful Thanksgiving

Disclaimer:  everything contained in this blog is MY OPINION. Every attempt is made to present the truth through actual facts or to identify statements which are in doubt;  otherwise there will be no deliberate presentation of gossip, rumor, or innuendo which can't be proven as factual.

When you get tired of roasted turkey, turkey sandwiches, turkey hash, turkey soup, turkey pie, go over to Carlito's and pig out on their excellent sampler plate.

The concept of giving thanks  has been practised for centuries.  The ancient Egyptians, Romans, Teutons, Druids, Aztecs, Mayans, African,  and Asian cultures have all had some form of regular feasting and thanks, usually in gratitude or to propitiate their gods.
We most often associate giving thanks with a bountiful harvest.  However, thanks-days in ancient times were often held to recognize the relief from peril or threat.  For instance, when the Spanish Armada was turned away from England Queen Elizabeth I ordered a day of thanks.
Nowadays, the scholars argue about the date of the first Thanksgiving in America based on whether or not it was for religious reasons or to celebrate a bountiful harvest. Originally the differences between religious celebrations and bounty feasts were not distinguished because the two were commonly interchangeable, including aspects of both because religion was a part of daily life and ever-present.
In our own country, there is some question as to when the first Thanksgiving was held. The popular date and place is associated with William Bradford, the ship Mayflower, and the colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts in the fall of 1621.  However, there are earlier thanks-giving celebrations of record.
The earliest of these seems to be a thanks-giving held by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in May of 1541 in Texas.  The location is claimed to have been Palo Duro Canyon, in the Panhandle.  However, documents mention that pecans were gathered for the feast, and none have ever grown in Palo Duro.  It seems more likely that the celebration was held in Blanco Canyon on the Brazos.
The Spanish in St. Augustine, Florida had a thanks-giving in 1568.
Texas has a further claim to another early thanks-giving.  It was given by the explorer Juan de Onate to celebrate the survival of the Rio Grande expedition, which had endured months of severe hardship. On 30  April 1598, de Onate held a feast near what is now San Elizario and claimed the land drained by the 'great river' to be the possession of the Spanish King Philip II.
In Virginia a thanks-giving celebration was documented in  1607, and in Jamestown, Virginia in 1610.
The settlement of Berkeley Hundred's royal charter required that the day of arrival, 4 December 1619, be officially designated as a "Day of Thanksgiving" to God.  Nearby Plimouth Plantation had a harvest celebration in 1621.
The Virginian Indians* of the Powhaten Confederacy, which included some 30 tribal towns, were at first disposed to be helpful and friendly and they and their white neighbors celebrated this first harvest  together.
However, colonization began to displace the Indians.  Fearing, with reason, further English expansion and confiscation of their lands, in 1622 the Indians appeared once again.  They were unarmed and brought venison, wild turkey, and other food.  The settlers welcomed them and prepared a feast. Suddenly the Indians dropped their peaceful pretense, grabbed any weapons at hand and proceeded to massacre their hosts.
The next fall, the Powhaten Confederacy chief saw that the English, although far outnumbered, were stubborn and with their superior arms were going to eventually take his lands.  He approached the colony with the intention of making a peace treaty.
The officials of the colony welcomed the chief and arranged for him and many of his allies to be invited to a thanks-giving celebration.  Innocent and unsuspicious, the Indians arrived.  Having been introduced to liquor by the settlers and acquiring a taste for it, they were happy to see copious amounts of it served:  they were even given containers of it to take with them.
Unfortunately, the colony physician Dr. John Potts had seen his chance and liberally poisoned the Indians' liquor.  Over 300 of them died, but the chief escaped.  There were no more communal thanks-givings with the Indians.
The first national Thanksgiving was declared by the Continental Congress in 1777.  After that there were intermittent celebrations and dates set, but there was nothing official until a presidential proclamation in 1863.  Finally, in 1941, federal legislation was passed making the 4th Thursday in November America's official Thanksgiving Day.
For whatever reason we celebrate Turkey Day, it is a family and friend time, a relaxed and happy time to give thanks with those we love.
Happy Thanksgiving!

*No, I am not politically correct.  My Indian friends laugh at the idea that they're 'Native Americans' exclusively, insisting that anyone born in America is a Native American.  Hence, I call them what they prefer:  Indians.

Anita Huguelet McMurtrie

You Go, Johnny!

Disclaimer:  everything contained in this blog is MY OPINION.  Every attempt is made to present the truth through actual facts or to identify statements which are in doubt;  otherwise there will be no deliberate presentation of gossip, rumor, or innuendo which can't be proven as factual.


Johnny Morris's  lawsuit is going to court.
A lot of things are apt to surface in open court that city authorities might wish they were able to trivialize or sweep under the rug.  Perhaps they should have thought about that when they offered an insultingly small amount as a mediated settlement.
These officials and their adherents appear to  absolutely refuse to acknowledge  that it wasn't WHAT was done, it was the WAY it was done.  I understand that it's "the way things are," to quote one of these officials, and that some people believe any method which will get them what they want is ok. I don't have to agree with it.
What kind of people are they that would conduct city business in such a manner?
I think the mayor, two commissioners, an ex-commissioner, and the city administrator should have to experience the same longterm embarrassment and humiliation to which Morris and others in the Electra Police Department were subjected.
It's really too bad four of these are immune to being fired because along with everything else in this blog, it's my opinion that people with the ethics and morality displayed in this whole ugly affair shouldn't be allowed to continue to represent Electra.


P. S. I don't care about the monetary penalties if Morris wins.  The city is insured, and in the case of personal suits against individuals, the townspeople aren't responsible for paying that. So all of you who are wailing about the cost and using that as an excuse to support the 'other' side and indulge in the famous negativity, think again.


Anita Huguelet McMurtrie