Busy day on tap. In addition to regular school classes and a pre-school meeting, Natural Disaster will practice tonight in Newtonia in preparation for our 4 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 18, performance at the annual Newtonia Fall Festival. It will be our first performance in a couple of months and I am looking forward to it.
We seem to have lost a lot of the momentum we had going before the three girls left the group, but we've got a nice set of 25 songs from the 1950s and 1960s we will perform at Newtonia. Hope to see some of you there.
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Diamond Town Forums, located at www.diamondtownforums.com , continues to grow. One nice thing is that other topics, as well as the ongoing school problems, are being discussed this time around. A student had some nice things to say about me in a couple of posts last night. (That's not the only reason I am plugging the site, however. People should have an avenue to express themselves and a source of information that is not thoroughly cleansed of all reality before they receive it.)
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A 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 15, preliminary hearing is scheduled for Donald Peckham, 71, the Jubilee Christian minister from Sarcoxie, who is charged with two felony counts of statutory sodomy, in connection with incidents with young boys. A Joplin Globe report indicated many more incidents were reported during the time Peckham was a minister in Kansas churches decades ago.
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Another presidential campaign and once again we are overloaded with trivia rather than a thorough examination of the issues. It does not matter what John Kerry did on a swift boat 35 years ago or what George W. Bush did or did not do in the National Guard three decades ago. What does matter is how they are going to keep American jobs from being shipped overseas, what they are going to do about health care, education, the war on terrorism, Iraq, and the other truly important issues that face America.
Unfortunately in an era in which campaigns are dominated by misleading 30-second (or less) commercials and media coverage of those commercials, any chance for real substance is virtually non-existent.
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I was reminded during academic team practice after school yesterday that another anniversary of an important local event was overlooked by the media.
The list of trivia questions incorrectly listed Carl Hubble as the man for whom the Hubble Telescope was named. "King" Carl Hubbell as baseball fans know, was the ace screwball pitcher (that was the pitch he threw, not any indictment of his behavior) during the 1930s and 1940s.
In the 1934 All-Star Game, only the third one to be played, Hubbell struck out five consecutive batters who would all later be inducted into the Hall of Fame...Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Al Simmons, Jimmie Foxx, and Joe Cronin. This July marked the 70th anniversary of this feat, which only one other person, Pedro Martinez of the Boston Red Sox, has ever even come close to in seven decades.
Many baseball reference books list Hubbell's hometown as Carthage. He actually was born near Avilla. The local media misses on opportunities to educate, as well as illustrate current events, when it neglects the rich history of this area.