Revenge of the Bluegill

“If that son of a gun had a bigger mouth he’d take my finger off,” said the man pointing to a fish in a galvanized tank.

        The man was Leo Pachner and the fish was a half-pound bluegill.

       Leo’s admiration for the scrappy little sunfish was legendary—not only was it a game fighter when caught, he said, but when filleted it made a tasty shore lunch. Leo had been feeding bluegill food pellets in this tank for a year or more. As editor and publisher of Farm Pond Harvest magazine he had invested time and money in experimental aquaculture projects that he featured in his magazine.

     Leo was born in Chicago’s back-of-the-yards district in 1908, and introduced to life in the great outdoors at nine years old, when his family became sugar beet sharecroppers near Unionville, Michigan. After harvest season the family stayed in Michigan, and took up hunting and fishing to survive until the next summer's crop.

    Often Leo’s opinions on fish nurturing rankled professional aquaculturists. But Leo’s advice was widely accepted by those pond owners and fishermen to whom he preached the necessity of conservation, fish feeding, and pond management.

     He is a member of the National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, helped found the Sport Fishing Institute, an expert fly fisherman, once a partner in an artificial bait company (P&K Bait), and inventor of the automatic retrieving fly reel. Nothing gave Leo greater pleasure then taking some youngster aside handing him or her a fly rod and teaching the rudiments of fly fishing, particularly if bluegill were to be had. To Leo, fly fishing was an everyman’s sport, and not to be enjoyed only by the wealthy or the privileged.

     Leo is no longer with us. If he were, the flap over bluegill invading Japanese waters and preying on native species, would bring him a feeling of, well, sweet revenge. (Japanese Emperor Akihito introduced bluegill to a Fisheries Agency research institute in 1960.) It’s ironic that the bluegill Leo so admired, and encouraged its acceptance as Illinois’ state fish would overrun Japanese rivers and vex Japanese authorities.

    Because after World War II Leo’s P&K Bait Company eventually went out of business. It could not compete, Leo told me, with the cheap fishing tackle flooding the sporting goods stores from Japan.

Celluloid Dreams on the Silver Screen: “To the delirious eye/More lovely things of Paradise and Love.”

“I have been happy—tho’ but in a dream./I have been happy—and I love the theme—/Dreams! in their vivid colouring of life—/As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty stride/Of semblance with reality which brings/To the delirious eye more lovely things/Of Paradise and Love—and all our own!/Than young hope in his sunniest hour hath known.”

—Edgar Allen Poe, “Dreams,” 1827

What is a motion picture but a writer’s dream made animate and articulate by light and sound. “That Holy dream,” said Poe in another poem, “While all the world were chiding/Hath cheered me as a lovely beam/A lonely spirit guiding.”

Can you imagine a world without “movies”? What would happen to the popcorn market?

There would not have been or continue to be those demigods of the silver-screen dream. They come before us in a hundred lovely and handsome guises, in fleeting, shadowy, misty stride, a semblance of reality that transcends time.

What would our life be like without those spirits of light and sound transfigured upon the silver screen, those once-upon-a-time motion picture stars of my youth?—Yvonne DeCarlo, Hedy Lamarr, Ingrid Bergman, Groucho Marx, Roy Rogers, Boris Karloff, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and, of course, Kankakee’s own Andy McBroom?

Never heard of him? You might know him by his professional name, David Bruce.

Not the proprietor of a local automobile franchise! Today’s owners of which by some peculiar twist of fate first acquired the automobile dealership once owned by the McBroom family; then innocently chose to use the first names of the co-owners, David and Bruce, as the name of their dealership.

Seldom do we have the opportunity to have any direct, meaningful contact with members of the motion picture industry. But occasionally “fate steps in,” as the song says, and life takes an unexpected turn. Only due to another improbable twist of fate would I meet and eventually work with that celebrated celluloid hero of my youth, David Bruce.

Marden “Andy” McBroom was born in Kankakee to Mr. and Mrs. Vernon McBroom in 1916. He graduated from Northwestern University, acted in 72 motion pictures for Warner Bros, and Universal Studios using the stage name David Bruce. He appeared in films with Errol Flynn, Alexis Smith, Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield, Deanna Durbin, Yvonne DeCarlo, Randolph Scott, Ronald Reagan, Robert Mitchum, and Loretta Young. He was seen on TV in Playhouse 90, Schlitz Playhouse, The Lone Ranger, Cisco Kid, Burns and Allen, The Red Skelton Show and Hopalong Cassidy. Gillette Razor, Schlitz Beer, Camel cigarettes, both Standard Oil and Lever Bros. hired Andy to do TV commercials. He wrote scripts for Tales of the Texas Rangers and The Beulah Show, and appeared in 80 stage plays, many of which he directed.

I met David Bruce, Andy, in the spring of 1966. He was living in Kankakee at the time. I was introduced to him by Jim Marek, his brother-in-law and owner of Colonial Studios. I was working for Mobil Chemical Company and had hired Jim to do some photographs for an advertisement. We needed a model to pose for pictures. Jim persuaded Andy to take the job. A few days later we were standing among tropical plants in Garfield Park Conservatory (Andy dressed in bush jacket and pith helmet), where I found myself saying: “Mr. Bruce, please stand there, look this way, no, raise your head a bit . . .” Strobe lights are flashing and Jim’s Haselblad is chewing up yards of film. What the hell am I doing? I asked myself. (David Bruce was a movie star—big time—when he came to talk to our high school assembly in 1945; he was co-starring with Deanna Durbin in Lady on a Train at the Paramount Theater.) “Your expression (my voice sounded odd, remote and a bit squelched), ah, Mr. Bruce, look . . . look as if you see something, ah, something that really catches your, uhm, eye, er, attention.”

Well, I’m not sure Andy felt happy about my “stage direction.” The full page ad, however, turned out very nice, thanks to Jim’s excellent photography. It was featured in a wood finishing magazine and used as the theme of a trade show display in Louisville, Kentucky.

At that time I was writing some material for Imperial International Learning. I mentioned to Andy that they were looking for someone with his talent and experience. A year later Andy and I were working together at Imperial.

Andy was a production manager, and developed dramatic material for educational audio tapes. He even recruited me for a role or two in some of his stories. One tape is particularly memorable: Andy, his daughter Amanda, several of the Imperial Players, including me, have roles in a dramatic, recreated moment in history. It wasn’t the movies, but at the time it seemed like the next best thing.

Many dream of a life of stardom in the camera’s eye, and the actor’s art — as transitory as the moon’s shimmering reflected sunlight on dancing waves — given immortality in microscopic grains of silver on celluloid. Only a celebrated few out of legions, have the Midas touch that turns celluloid dreams into the movie Mogul’s golden dreams.

“A small group of actors, fresh out of college hit New York in the 1937-38 season to try to make it on Broadway,” recalled Ardis Marek, Andy McBroom’s sister. “It was a disastrous time as the country tried to work its way back from the devastating depression. Theater was moribund, few plays were mounted, and only experienced, sure fire draws were being cast.”

Within that group, who were enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, was Ardis’s brother, Andy McBroom, and three of his friends, Dotty Keaton, Phillis Isley and Bob Walker. Between acting assignments they took whatever odd jobs available. Andy was hired as a page at CBS; Dotty and Phillis had waitress work, Bob spent a summer on a South American freighter. They shared a flat in Greenwich Village and parcelled out care packages from home.

Had these four seen their future at that moment, would they have turned aside from the bright dream of stardom? Probably not. Utah born, twenty-year-old Robert Walker, already emotionally wounded by his parents divorce, was high strung and vulnerable, slight of build, boyish in appearance. He would eventually take a “star turn” in the World War II movie, See Here Private Hargrove; Alfred Hitchcock would give him an unforgettable roll as a psychopathic killer in the 1951 nail-bitter, Strangers on a Train. Phyllis Isley from Tulsa Oklahoma, angelic of face and sensual of body, would at 24 be christened Jennifer Jones by the Moguls, star as the tragic Bernadette of Lourdes, and live the golden dream as best actress of 1943. Dorothy Keaton within a year would surrender the acting life. Andy in the guise of David Bruce, tall, athletic, answered Hollywood’s call for the hero, the swashbuckler, the stoic military man, the laconic cowboy, and the impassioned adventurer. Andy’s career would be longer, more diverse and perhaps more satisfying than those of his companions. But he would never focus down to one brilliant golden moment of celluloid afterlife. His ubiquitous talents as actor, writer, narrator and stage director; his cultivated air of urbane civility and an innate wit for light comedy, would never be transfigured by a Mogul’s Midas touch.

Bob and Phillis found work as a team in Greenwich Village’s Cherry Lane Theater at fifty cents a performance. Then a call came from Phillis’s home town of Tulsa asking her to join a dramatic group. Phillis suggested the four form a stock company, accept the offer and say good-bye to New York.

When their Grayhound bus pulled into Chicago, Andy offered them a weekend stopover at his parent’s home in Kankakee. While there Dotty Keaton decided she would not continue on to Oklahoma, nor return to her home in Oregon. The McBrooms offered her a job in their restaurant and she remained in Kankakee for seven years.

“Oklahoma provided audiences with some good plays,” said Ardis, “and the actors with the experience they needed.”

Bob saved his $25-a-week salary for 14 weeks. On January 2, 1939, Robert Walker and Phillis Isley were married.

Andy, Bob and Phillis then journeyed on to Hollywood. Phillis soon was cast as an ingenue in Tracy’s G-Men, and a western with John Wayne, The New Frontier. However, the roles did not keep coming in and the Walkers returned to New York, where they took up housekeeping in a $16-a-month room at the rear of a tenement.

Andy soon found himself under contract to Universal Studios and in a number of motion pictures. His 1940 filmography lists 13 appearances in such diverse movies as The Sea Hawk, River’s End and Dispatch from Reuters and others.

As we see annually on TV, the pride and power of Hollywood’s Moguls still have the Midas touch of fame and fortune for talented artists of the motion picture industry. Perhaps the gift of an Academy Oscar does not gild the recipient as augustly as in the era of the strict studio system. There was a time in the 1930s and ‘40s when future stars were groomed carefully, pampered and contractually bound as celluloid chattel. For some, the happiest days of managed stardom were luxurious beyond imagination; for others, they were far too short and sometimes ruinous.

In 1940, when Phyllis and Robert Walker returned to New York from Hollywood, their future in films seemed at an end. The bright hope of stardom paled in the melancholy shadows of Phyllis’s bleak tenement apartment. Bob answered casting calls for stage work. He took odd jobs to support a growing family. Two sons were born. Then, favored by a bit of luck, Bob got a role in the radio soap opera, Yesterday’s Children. By 1943 the Walkers were again on their way to Hollywood.

Their Kankakee friend Andy McBroom, who had remained in Hollywood, married Cynthia Sory in January 1943. He also had appeared, more or less as a face in the crowd, in several action motion pictures—The Sea Wolf, Sergeant York, Flying Tigers, Gung Ho! The parts were small but they led to bigger assignments.

Universal Studios offered Andy a second banana part in a movie billed as “A Sensation in Horror!”; sharing the romantic lead as the fiance of B movie queen, Evelyn Ankers, and victim of George Zucco’s “ancient Mayan nerve gas.” As the plot coagulates, Zucco, aka Dr. Alfred Morris, hoping to romance Ankers, slips Andy a Mayan “mickey.” The devious doctor is unaware that lurking in the background is another Ankers fancier, the inscrutable Turhan Bey. Under the influence of the nerve gas Andy becomes what the movie’s title describes as “The Mad Ghoul,” a revengeful Zombie. Although this parchment-skinned horror was not as fearsome as the Mummy, Dracula, the Wolfman or Frankenstein’s monster he did provide a few Saturday afternoon thrills at the long-gone Luna Theater on Kankakee’s South Schuyler. Fortunately there was no sequel and Andy escaped the fate of other actors who were forever breathing life into the living dead to earn their bread and butter.

Nineteen forty-three was an auspicious year for Phyllis Flora Isley Walker. David O. Selznick changed her name to Jennifer Jones and cast her as Bernadette Soubirous in The Song of Bernadette. In a twinkling of the camera’s magic eye, at the age of 24, Phyllis ascended to that seventh heaven of cinematic fame, best actress of 1943.

The Walkers soon were separated. He took small rolls in Bataan and Madam Curie; she prepared for the next Selznick epic, Since You Went Away. This film starring Claudette Colbert, Shirley Temple, Lionel Barrymore had the pretensions of a previous Selznick blockbuster, Gone With the Wind. Estranged in life the Walkers were reunited as lovers in Since You Went Away.

For her portrayal of Jane Hilton in Since You Went Away, the Academy nominated Jennifer Jones as best supporting actress of 1944. The same year, Robert Walker triumphed as a journalist GI in See Here Private Hargrove.

Jennifer Jones and David O. Selznick were married in 1949. She continued to be cast in a number of first run movies including Madam Bovery, Ruby Gentry, and A Farewell to Arms. Her last movie, Towering Inferno, was in 1974.

A dispirited Robert Walker died unexpectedly in 1951, soon after finishing what is considered the best performance of his career as Bruno Antony in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.

Meanwhile, Universal gave David Bruce a small part in a Deanna Durbin movie, Christmas Holiday. He then played opposite Louise Allbritton in That Night With You. In a film that put Yvonne De Carlo’s name up in lights, Salome, Where She Danced, Andy shared with Rod Cameron a rivalry for Yvonne’s affections, and he dueled with villainous Albert Dekker. Andy was given a romantic lead in the 1945 Deanna Durbin comedy-murder mystery, Lady on a Train. He later had top billing in a low budget 1948 production of Prejudice; and was featured as Daniel Boone in Young Daniel Boone in 1950.

In 1952 and ‘53, Andy played Harry Henderson on the Beulah TV series. He also was writing scripts for Tales of the Texas Rangers, making guest appearances on TV’s Lone Ranger, Sky King and The Cisco Kid, and acting in several adventure movies. The last one was Jungle Hell, with Sabu, “the elephant boy,” in 1956.

Andy’s wife Cynthia died in 1962.

After several years absence Andy returned to Hollywood intending to resume his acting career. He died on May 3, 1976, while working on the set of a TV series.

The Father of Black History

He wrote 16 books on African-American history. In 1915, at Chicago, he founded the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History. The next year he began publishing the Journal of Negro History, and in 1926 instituted Negro History Week (officially changed to Black History Month in 1976). He is the son of former slaves, born in 1875 at New Canton, Buckingham County, Virginia. He is known as the “father of black history.”

Self-taught in the school subjects of his time, Carter Goodwin Woodson labored in the coal fields of Fayette County Virginia until at the age of 20 he was able to enter Douglass High School in Huntington.

After graduating from Bera College, Kentucky, in 1901, Woodson, t came back to Douglas High School as its principal. Later, he would be a school supervisor in the Philippines, earn B. A. and M. A. degrees from the University of Chicago, and a Ph. D. in history from Harvard University, teach languages in Washington D. C. high schools, and become the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at both Howard University and West Virginia State College. During a year of study in Asia and Europe and a semester at the Sorbonne Woodson would master several languages.

Given a grant to study the 1830 census wherein he found there were blacks who owned slaves convinced Woodson a need existed for special research into black history. He believed the neglect, ignorance and misrepresentation that had clouded the Negro’s past could be dispelled by scholarly works. “If a race has no history,” wrote Woodson, “if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.” Woodson set out to give his people an authentic history.

In 1915 Woodson published The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861. That book was followed by A Century of Negro Migration (1918), The History of the Negro Church (1927) and The Negro in Our History. This last book has gone through several editions and was revised by Charles Harris Wesley in 1950. It is considered “one of the finest full-length works on black history.” Among other works of Woodson’s are The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written During the Crisis, 1900-1860, The African Background Outlined, and The Mis-Education of the Negro.

In 1920 Woodson organized the Associated Publishers for the purpose of putting into print books on African-American culture and history. The Negro History Bulletin first issued by Woodson in 1937 was created for elementary and high school teachers.

Woodson contemplated compiling a six-volume Encyclopedia Africana. He died in April 1950, before completing the project.

In 1992, the Library of Congress honored Dr. Woodson with an exhibition entitled “Moving Back Barriers: The Legacy of Carter G. Woodson.” The Library has a collection of 5,000 items from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries donated by Woodson.

Dr. Woodson and W. E. B. DuBois, another Harvard graduate, are credited with laying the foundations of modern Afrocentric scholarship. Since its beginning, Afrocentricism has attracted numerous followers and much controversy. It has gained the support of the internationally authoritative Association For the Study of Classical African Civilizations.

Afrocentric scholarship denies its discourse is the product of flawed evidence or pseudoscience, and champions the concept of Africa as the birthplace of mankind and the wellspring of civilization. It argues that Anglo-European religion, philosophy and science has ignored, or consciously suppressed and distorted African heritage and its contribution to civilization’s progress. The role of Afrocentricism and Pan-Africanism is to restore Africans to their rightful place in world history.

• • •

Among Anglo-European nineteenth century evolutionists there were, according to Stephan Jay Gould (The Mismeasure of Man), two modes of thinking about “racial ranking”: monogenism (from a single source), and polygenism (from many sources).

The single-source backers “upheld the scriptural unity of all peoples in the single creation of Adam and Eve. . . . Human races are a product of degeneration from Eden’s perfection. Races have declined to different degrees, whites least and blacks most.”

The many-sources advocates “abandoned scripture as allegorical and held that human races were separate biological species, the descendants of different Adams. As another form of life, blacks need not participate in the ’equality of man.’”

Either argument could be used without a twinge of misgiving in the nineteenth century to uphold the enslavement of Africans.

Gould explains that the single-source idea of “degenerationism was probably the more popular argument, if only because scripture was not to be discarded lightly.”

But the idea that the races had originated from different Adams (many-sources) reinforced the idea of pure racial stock. Josiah Nott preached this doctrine in the ante-bellum South and was looked upon as a benefactor who defended the South’s “peculiar institutions,” and aided “most materially in giving the negro his true position as an inferior race.”

The only problem with the many-sources argument was that it cast aside the literal interpretation of the story of God’s creation of Adam. Nott attempted to solve this dilemma by setting the natural history of mankind apart from the Bible, and placing “each upon its own foundation, where it may remain without collision or molestation.”

Nott’s solution, said Gould, “forced the defenders of slavery into a quandary. Should they accept a strong argument from science at the cost of limiting religion’s sphere? Degeneration of blacks under the curse of Ham was an old and eminently functional standby.”

The book of Genesis says that Noah, Ham’s father, for some event that is open to interpretation, placed a curse on Ham’s son, Canaan: “a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” Says one Biblical authority: “Some of Canaan’s descendants, the Gibeonites—in line, apparently, with Noah’s prophecy—were told by Joshua, ‘You shall always be slaves, hewers of wood and drawers of water.’” To many interpreters of the Bible this implied a sanctioned precedent for slavery, and an opinion that the descendants of Canaan were black Africans.

On the other hand the African-American church in its formative stage in the early 1800s turned to the Bible to, in the words of Dr. St. Clair Drake, “‘prove’ that Black people, Ethiopians, were powerful and respected when white men in Europe were barbarians. Ethiopia came to symbolize all of Africa . . . ‘Ethiopianism’ became an energizing myth in both the New World and in Africa itself for those pre-political movements that arose while the powerless were gathering enough strength for realistic and rewarding political activity.”

Arguments from a time before the Civil War may seem irrelevant today considering scientific findings about the origins of all humankind. But the racial bigotry they inspired on both sides still lingers as a stumbling block to a true and workable solution to “interracial” accord.

Mars in Aquarius

In the summer of 2003 the planet Mars, at one of its closes approaches to Earth,

could be seen as a small brilliant light in the constellation of Aquarius.

It may be written at some distant day, in another century, that during the first decade of the twenty-first century there appeared in the night sky a fiery light that outshone all others except the Moon and Sun. It came into the sky from the east growing brighter each night. Long ago named Ares and then Mars, this ancient God of War is known as a wanderer along the Sun’s path, often mostly obscure and hardly noticeable, except when lit by an infrequent brightly burning light. Eventually Ares falls into the blaze of sunlight and is not consumed, but is resurrected at dawn by his brother, Phoebus Apollo, and sent on his way.

An omen of ominous portent, this God of War, to those who divine the heavenly script written in starlight. The Greeks believed Ares did not come alone. Attending him in his journey were Discord and Strife, and the Goddess of War, Enyo. Terror and Trembling and Panic were at her side. “As they move,” said Edith Hamilton (Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes), “the voice of groaning arise behind them and the earth streams with blood.” And, she says: “Homer calls him, murderous, bloodstained, the incarnate curse of mortals; and, strangely, a coward, too, who bellows with pain and runs away when wounded.”

The Romans gave Ares another name, Mars, and took a more heroic view of his character. In Virgil’s poem Aeneid, he is a warrior, “magnificent in shining armor,” wrote Hamilton, “redoubtable, invincible.” On Mars’ field of battle, Roman soldiers seek a glorious death, “and find it ‘sweet to die in battle.’”

• • •

In ancient Sumero-Babylon texts historians have found references to a deity named “Nergal,” associated with the planet Mars. In this context he has been cast out of heaven and rules the underworld as the “raging king.” Nergal’s gifts to humankind are War, Pestilence, Fever and Devastation.

So it appears that from most ancient times the planet Mars has sent us a subliminal message, subject to decoding and interpretation.

Mars and the other celestial lights challenged man’s imagination for an explanation of their origin and meaning.

To long-ago watchers of the night sky in the deserts of the Mideast, Mars would have been the most intriguing of celestial wanderers. Over a 25 to 27 month period the size and brightness of Mars varies more than any other planet. About every 2 years 2 months Mars reaches its highest point in the sky, at midnight.

At its brightest, when the Earth and Mars are closest, Mars can be brilliant. But during its journey around the Sun in an elliptical orbit Mars fades to a faint object in a field of brighter stars. And Mars has another peculiarity, at times it appears to turn back on its path. This is also true of the apparent movement of the other planets whose orbits are beyond Earth’s. This illusion is caused by a change in perspective as Earth on an inside track swings past those planets.

• • •

It seems clear that some concept of time first grew out of the observed phases of the Moon and the summer and winter solstices and their relationship to the seasons. (The sky, it appears, was mankind’s first clock and calendar.)

The Sun might rule the day, but the realm of the planets is confined to that interval between dusk and dawn, that mysterious time of sleep and dreams. The meaning of the celestial lights in the nocturnal sky lies in the realm of occult invention.

To imagine the process that created a mythology, a religion, a calendar and an almanac from celestial evidence is pure speculation. But we could suggest that by translating what was observable into some fanciful anthropomorphic and zoomorphic iconography the hoped for occult meaning of the heavens were eventually revealed and the message defined in words.

If the Sun was pictured as a metaphorical king, seemingly the largest and most powerful object in the sky, then those traveling the king’s journey across the heavens in his absence, the Moon and seven observable planets, were lesser nobles. The development of an astral-theology might have begun with this thought: The seasons and thus planting and harvesting appeared to be a decree of the Sun as his path moved annually north to south and back again. This power is beyond human comprehension. The Sun controls all earthly vital activities including the migration of game herds, the cycle of animal reproduction, the growth and flowering of plants, etc., as they respond to this king’s yearly movement along that sky path known as the “ecliptic” to astronomers and the “Zodiac” to astrologers. It also can be seen that the sea tides rise and fall in response to the dictates of the Moon. These powers are unearthly and supernatural. Those other heavenly minions who follow the Sun’s path, are they not also of a supernatural, unearthly nature? What powers do they have over mankind’s activities?

For example, what interpretation could be made of Mars as it slowly grew in size and brightness? It had the ominous color of a distant fire. Fire when uncontrolled is deadly; when controlled it is life giving. Not surprising then is that in some cultures the deity associated with the planet Mars has a dual nature—God of War, and a God of Agriculture.

Along the king’s path there are several “houses.” These are constellations which can be resolved into 12 designs and given names. The house of each figure occupies 30 degrees of that circular path, the Zodiac. “Broadly speaking,” says an explanation of the Zodiac, “the 12 signs of the Zodiac can be divided into both masculine and feminine, positive and negative, or, active and passive. The masculine signs are Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius and Aquarius, whereas the feminine signs are Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn and Pisces.” Thus by projecting opposing human attributes on the signs a resonance between heaven and Earth was established and channels of communication opened.

It was observed that Sun, Moon and planets moved through these signs of the Zodiac in orderly but different combinations. Was this the key to decoding celestial communion?

In 2003 Mars appeared and reached its brightest in the constellation Aquarius during August. Ten years before, Mars occupied the constellation Gemini and was brightest in January. To the astrologer who would compare Mars’ position to the Moon, Sun and other visible planets, each of the two appearances would deliver different messages.

Eventually, throughout centuries of observation and interpretation celestial revelations were made known, the physical is made metaphysical, mythologies written and religions founded. And astrology (knowledge and interpretation of the stars) gave birth to the empirical science of astronomy (laws and knowledge governing the stars). This is a historic process so complex as to fill volumes of explanation.

Ancient astral-cosmology underlies our Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian theological heritage; Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism and Islam contain remnants of it. One cannot escape the idea that Mars’ companions, War, Terror, Trembling and Panic, or Nergal’s deadly plagues, War, Pestilence, Fever and Devastation, were the ancestors of the Four Horsemen (Conquest, War, Famine and Death) in the Revelation to John; or that Saint Michael the Archangel inherited Mars’ sword and became “the patron and defender of Israel against its enemies.” Is it merely coincidence the angel Lucifer, as was Nergal, was cast out of heaven and became the king of the underworld?

Horoscopes based on those 12 Zodiacal icons are still with us. Days of the week are named for Sun (Sunday) and Moon (Monday). Tuesday is taken from the Scandinavian “Tiwdag,” or “Tiw,” (Mars) God of War. Wednesday, “Onsdag,” can be traced back to a Scandinavian name for Mercury. Thursday is “Tosdag,” Jupiter; Friday, “Fredag,” Venus, and Saturday, “Lordag,” Saturn. The month of March owes its name to Mars. If your name is Martin, look up, the origin of your name shines brightly in the darkness.

For anyone looking up, do not be intimidated by the vastness of the starry heavens. Don’t say it makes you feel so small and so humble. We are all children of those celestial lights. A heavy element, for example, such as iron, which is a component of hemoglobin and allows your blood to carry oxygen from your lungs to the cells of your body, was forged in the belly of a forgotten star—a supernova that exploded long ago and fertilized space with life sustaining elements.

We in fact are made of stardust. And if it happens that we are the only sentient beings in the whole universe, then we have the great and exclusive privilege of allowing the universe to look back upon itself through our eyes!

Breakfast in Valhalla

Note: I wrote this essay several years ago. At that time a veterans group called the Vintage Squadron met twice a month for breakfast at the local VFW. The breakfasts are no longer held there, but continue at a local restaurant. 

It is 8:00 a.m. on a Wednesday morning at the VFW in Kankakee, Illinois, The chairs at the tables in the banquet room are slowly filling until within fifteen or twenty minutes 80 to 100 men have gathered. All once members of one or another branch of the military (a few currently serving in the reserve); all now sharing an hour or two of memories and fellowship. Their experiences range from World War II to Desert Storm, from the Bataan death march to combat in Iraq; from high-altitude streams of bombers over Europe to the last bombing of Japan; from the shell cratered beaches and tropical jungles of Pacific islands to the shooting gallery rice paddies of Vietnam; from the frozen Chosin reservoir in Korea and the landing at Inchon to the D-day invasion of Europe and the Battle of the Bulge; from naval battle groups and carriers steaming westward, to silent running beneath enemy flotillas; from bomber fighter escort to helicopter rescue; from jeeps to tanks, single-engine, bi-wing trainers to supersonic jets; from orderly rooms and supply depots to weather stations and control towers; from base hospitals, guard houses and mess halls to lonely foxholes on the perimeter of hell. Flight One of the Vintage Squadron is present and accounted for. It is breakfast time in Valhalla.

    One of the greatest of privileges is to be among these men. Not that they would ever characterize this breakfast or any of the other twice a month meetings as a gathering of heroic warriors, such as the title of this little essay might indicate. But in the aggregate they embody unwritten volumes of a vast collection of experience, of service and sacrifice to their country for over half a century, some of it workaday, some of it truly heroic, where humor and pathos shade the telling.

    I once sat between two veteran infantrymen of different eras. One had been a platoon sergeant, who survive the December 1944 German onslaught on Bastogne; the other a private trying to stay alive while engaged in an uphill battle on some obscure enemy outpost in Korea. Said the platoon sergeant, it was the replacements, they came in in the morning and were dead by evening, I never had a chance to even know their names. Said the private, I just ran as fast as I could, firing as fast as I could. My gun got so hot that the Cosmoline remaining where I hadn’t been able to clean it out melted and ran down across my hands and blistered them.

    Pilots and crew members of all types of military aircraft recall, sometimes humorously, sometimes with self-deprecating candor, the moments of terror and moments of exaltation during aerial combat. One B-29 pilot and crew finish a record 30 missions over Japan insuring them a ticket home, except that on this final bomb run flack and Japanese fighters knock out the B-29’s starboard engines. The pilot manages a titanic struggle to keep the bomber in the air until it reaches Iwo Jima, where it makes a crash landing on an emergency runway. The crew survives. Tragically, this incident is only a prelude to a second crash two weeks later off Kwajaline Atoll, involving the same pilot and crew, who are flying to Hawaii on another B-29. Minutes after takeoff this aircraft plummets into the water. Three crew members survive—the pilot and two of his gunners. Then there is the story of a crippled B-17 returning to England after a raid on Germany. An inflatable life raft stowed in a compartment is shaken lose and inflates inside the fuselage. It hits one of the waist guns and causes the gun to swivel and fire toward the rear of the aircraft. A round strikes the tail gunner in the butt. Undoubtedly the only aircrew member ever to be shot by a life raft.

    Some men for short periods of their lives held positions of command, made life and death decisions, were asked to lead other men to what Lincoln defined as “the last full measure of devotion.” The dark deeds of necessity on the battlefield are not easily told, very rarely. Only rows of crosses and white grave markers in distant fields remain as silent testaments.

    Occasionally into this venerable gathering comes a young man in spiffy dress class A. Close cropped hair and the ruddy flush of desert tan still garnish his cheeks. Just back, he says. And soon old men recall how they once in military duds stood tall and lean in solid ranks on parade. Memories find voice. Not forgotten the dead and gone. And so the coffee cools, the rosy blush of morning fades, and one by one the men depart. 

    Into this now quiet Valhalla the Valkyries summon members of those legions lost on bloody fields of war. Ghostly banners, flags and ensigns unfurl to mark the eternal bivouac of the dead. Not forgotten! is passed from file to file. Rest easy. Not forgotten, echoes. Not in vain we died. The price we paid to purchase liberty not too dear—was it? Youth cut short, a promise unfulfilled. An honored death. 

    And so Valhalla awaits the next Wednesday morning communion of the tried and tested, brother patriots and men at arms, and those who served behind the lines of battle. They come, as do winter birds to sunny shores, to bask in the warm glow of friendship, to share with aging comrades another breakfast in Valhalla.

“Negroes in the Servitude of our Planters”

“‘Me come say ha-do . . .’ and then they all troop off as noiselessly as they entered, like a procession of sable dreams.” 

Opposition to slavery in the American colonies began with the Quakers in Pennsylvania in the 1680s. For the next hundred years the problem of slavery was discussed in “instructions” issued at monthly meetings: “. . . we have thought proper to make our advice and judgment more public, that none may plead ignorance of our principles therein; and also again earnestly exhort all, to avoid in any manner encouraging that practice, of making slaves of our fellow creatures.”

    Malachy Postlethwayt (c.1707–1767), writer on economics and publicist) argued that the advantages of African and West India trade “are the most nationally beneficial of any we carry on. . . . that Traffic only affording our Planters a constant Supply of Negroe-Servants for the Culture of their lands . . . owing primarily to the Labour of Negroes; who, as they were the first happy Instruments of raising our Plantations; so their Labor can only support and preserve them, and render them still more and more profitable to their Mother-Kingdom. . . . But I never heard it said that the Lives of Negroes in the Servitude of our Planters were less tolerable than those of Colliers and Miners in all Christian Countries.”

   Condemnation of slavery by European and North American religious leaders and philosophers during the 1700s fueled arguments about human rights and God-given law. But as a practical matter, “The issue of slavery, as if formed in the eighteenth century, was based on fear, defense, and profit—not morality. (Great Issues in American History) As they came to recognize the problems of a large slave population, most Southern colonies tried to impose a highly restrictive import duty to discourage if not prohibit the importation of slaves. The British, over a period of fifty years, struck down these attempts, which encouraged Jefferson in the first draft of the Declaration to include in his indictment of the king the statement, ‘He [the king] has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce,’ an assertion that was eliminated in the final version because it offended New England merchants and certain Southern planters.” 

   The Revolutionary War, fought to protect the universal “natural rights of men,” caused many Americans to see slavery as a violation of those rights.

   Thomas Paine became one of the most influential voices for the abolition of slavery in colonial America. In 1775 he published an essay on African slavery.

   “. . . . Too many nations enslaved the prisoners they took in war,” wrote Paine. “But to go to nations with whom there is no war, who have no way provoked, without further design of conquest, purely to catch inoffensive people, like wild beasts, for slaves, is an height of outrage against Humanity and Justice, that seems left by Heathen nations to be practiced by pretended Christians. How shameful are all attempt to colour and excuse it!

   “As these people are not convicted of forfeiting freedom, they have still a natural, perfect right to it; and the Governments whenever they come should, in justice set them free, and punish those who hold them in slavery. . . .”

   On April 14, 1775, the first anti-slavery society in America was organized in Philadelphia. Paine became a member.

   Antislavery protests after 1817 were led by the American Colonization Society. The American Antislavery Society, founded in 1833, supported William Lloyd Garrison’s crusade against slavery. 

   Antislavery politicians founded the Liberty Party in 1840.

•   •   •

It is believed generally among historians that the idea of the abolition of slavery grew out of the philosophical sea change in Anglo-European thinking labeled the “Enlightenment.” 

   Peter Gay described the Enlightenment as “A loose, informal, wholly unorganized coalition of cultural critics, religious skeptics, and political reformers from Edinburgh to Naples, Paris to Berlin, Boston to Philadelphia . . .united on a vastly ambitious program . . . of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom, above all freedom in its many forms . . .” 

   There are scholars such as Hilary Beckles who suggest that there was an “‘indigenous anti-slavery movement’ among Africans in America. That is, abolitionism was as much a BLACK response to slavery as a European phenomenon, and hence the concentration on the abolition movement in the standard literature as a WHITE, European movement is only part of the story.” 

   Paul E. Lovejoy explains that “Institutions of servitude, including slavery, that were acceptable in Africa and to which many Africans had been exposed even before their own enslavement were no longer acceptable in the Americas.” The conditions in America “were such that the ideological framework that countenanced slavery was transformed into abolitionism.”

•   •   •

   The names of Americans who supported the abolitionist movement during the years before the Civil War—Elijah P. Lovejoy, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Wendell Phillips—have become legendary. One name, Fanny Kemble, remains in relative obscurity. She was the wife of a plantation owner on Butler’s Island, Georgia. Yet some say she had as much to do with the abolition of slavery as the celebrated Harriet Beecher Stowe.

   The condition of the slaves at Butler Place on Butler’s Island was far different from those seen by Stowe at Brentwood Plantation in Kentucky. 

   Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was inspired by stories of runaway slaves and tales of the Underground Railroad she had heard while living in Cincinnati, and by a mystical vision; Kemble experienced firsthand absolute human degradation on Butler’s Island. During the critical year of 1863, when England was on the verge of recognizing the Southern Confederacy, Kemble published in London and New York her memoir, A Residence on a Georgia Plantation. 

   Critics and historians still argue the authenticity of Kemble’s book and the influence it had in England’s decision to not recognize the Confederacy. 

   “But, fact or fiction,” wrote Margaret Armstrong in Fanny Kemble, a Passionate Victorian, “its worst enemies could not deny that the horrid story was interesting. . . . Mrs. Kemble’s account of plantation life was accepted at its face value, as the statement of an eye witness and a dreadful indictment of slavery.”

   Before her marriage to Pierce Butler, Fanny, the niece of the noted tragedienne Sarah Siddons, had been an actress who charmed audiences with her beauty and talent in England and America. Appalled by the conditions she found in the slave quarters on Butler’s Island, Fanny shocked her husband and the plantation’s overseer by entering hovels in which slaves lived and attempting to improve the intolerable conditions she found there. But her fearless ministry only antagonized her husband who resented her “northern” prejudices, and who saw himself as a wise and benevolent ruler of contented subjects. 

   In a letter Fanny wrote from Butler Place in 1840 she said: “I found an old negro named Friday lying on the floor of the damp, dark, filthy room; his glazed eyes and rattling breath told me that he was dying. . . . There he lay—the worn out slave whose life had been spent in unrequited labor for me and mine, without one physical alleviation, one Christian solace, one human sympathy—panting out his last breath like a forsaken beast of burden rotting where it falls. As I bent over him, blinded with tears of unavailing pity, there was a quivering of the eyelids and falling of the jaw—and he was free. How I rejoiced for him; and how, as I turned to the wretches who were calling to me from the inner room, I wished they were all gone with him, freed by death, from bitter, bitter bondage.”

In Search of Africa’s History

“The Africans who came to the United States as slaves started their attempts to reclaim their lost African heritage soon after they arrived in this country. They were searching for the lost identity that the slave system had destroyed. Concurrent with the Black man’s search for an identity in America has been his search for an identity in the world, which means, in essence, his identity as a human being with a history, before and after slavery, that can command respect.”

    The above passage was written by Dr. John Henrik Clarke in an “Afterward” to the 1986 republication of J. C. DeGraft-Johnson’s 1954 ground-breaking book, African Glory: The Story of Vanished Negro Civilizations (Black Classic Press, Baltimore, MD).

    “African Glory is a general history of Africa written by an indigenous African scholar,” said Dr. Clarke. “This book was published in 1954, the eve of the ‘Independence explosion’ in Africa and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Colonialism and the attitudes that went with it were being challenged by African people and people throughout the world. In demanding the right to rule their land, they were also demanding the right to interpret their history.”

    When DeGraft-Johnson sat down to write African Glory in the early 1950s he faced a dilemma: Should he write an overall history of Africa without detailing racial types; or, in his words, “regard Africa as the ‘Land of the Negroes’ and give a history of the Negro race[?]” He was aware that a whole section of South Africa’s Witwatersrand University was devoted to research into the origins and distribution of the “Negro race,” but ancient bones found in Africa were still the center of heated controversy. He knew some learned men believed there were “no Negro skulls of any antiquity—the oldest known is about 6000 B. C.” 

    “It must be noted that we have not yet succeeded in finding out the original home or the evolutionary area of the Negro,” DeGraft-Johnson concluded. He then set aside the arguments and wrote: “In this book we can only hope to touch on some of the salient landmarks in the history of this vast continent.”

    Anyone who has watched Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Wonders of the African World on PBS will find familiar ground in African Glory. Histories of lost kingdoms, of African empires, of African literati and the diaspora of the slave trade are common themes. Citing a lecture given by Professor Emil Torday in Geneva in 1931, DeGraft-Johnson wrote that the slave trade broke up or undermined the various and once peaceful “peasantry” of indigenous African cultures. Then came slave traders “and millions of de-tribalized or decentralized Africans were let loose upon each other. . . .”

•   •   •

    In Haiti the 1791 slave rebellion overthrew a French government. For eight years Toussaint L’Ouverture ruled a free black republic. Afrocentrism surfaced in Haiti during the 1820s and declared the origins of black African civilization lay in ancient Egypt. 

    In the United States Afrocentric thought and the Black Nationalism movement began at least 100 years before the publication of African Glory. William J. Moses (The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925, 1978), suggests that the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Law, marked “a point at which several black leaders began to turn in the direction of the back-to-Africa movements.”

    Moses noted in the introduction to his book Africans living in a “Westernized” culture recognized “differences between African societies and the self-confident, civilized, Anglo-Saxon culture.” A movement began that advocated African civilization, “which embodied a sense of obligation to aid in the uplifting of the continent and its ‘backward’ peoples as an initial step in the elevation of black people everywhere. . . . If Africa could be uplifted, the slave trade would cease. Africans living abroad could take pride in their homeland. The humanity of the Negro would be vindicated and the link between blackness and slavery would be destroyed, once an African civilization had been established.” Out of “Pan-Africanism” evolved an authoritarian collectivist ideal, “a belief that all black people could and should act unanimously under the leadership of one powerful man or group of men, who would guide the race by virtue of superior knowledge or divine authority towards the goal of civilization.”

    Black separatism, the secular form of the Black Nationalism movement, and the religious form, Ethiopeanism (inspired by the Old Testament story of enslaved Israelites in Egypt), were practiced by Westernized Africans of the late nineteenth century. 

    Ironically, said Moses, “Black chauvinism” was a stepchild of European racial theory. “Strangely, the black nationalists of the nineteenth century tended to accept the descriptions of the various races and their innate characteristics almost exactly as they had been described by the European philosophers. . . . Racial chauvinism therefore often consisted of arguing that nature had actually been kinder to the sensitive and gentle African than the stolid, frigid European.” 

•   •   •

    What was known about the history of African people in the late 1800s? 

    During the 1400s the Portuguese had explored the west African coast and by 1488 Diaz had reached the southern Tip of the continent. Slave trade began in 1442, when 10 Africans were brought to Lisbon. For over 350 years trade along the coasts of Africa, and trade with the sub-Sahara kingdoms by Muslim states of the Near East, brought many parts of Africa under the influence of Eastern and Western countries, and Christian and Islam religions. It wasn’t until 1880 that European powers began to divide Africa into colonies. However, travelers, explorers and missionaries had collected enough information by 1875 so that a series of histories of a sort could be compiled and published in England by Rev. Dr. J. G. Wood. A two volume set of Wood’s works including the African histories was printed in the United States in 1878 under the title The Uncivilized Races of Men in All Countries of the World. 

    The author’s Preface states that because of “the extraordinary variety of the native customs which prevail in that wonderful land [Africa]. . . . It will be seen . . . how necessary it is to devote to that one continent a considerable portion of this work.” Six hundred and ninety-three pages of the first volume and 185 engravings are allotted to African cultures. 

    The American publisher’s Preface recognizes the Rev. Dr. Wood as “among the most popular and foremost writers of Great Britain,” and recommends that The Uncivilized Races of Man was worthy of a place in every household library.

    The Uncivilized Races of Man indoctrinated the general public with a view of Africa held by white Christian missionaries and judged by Victorian morality. Africa appeared to be a continent of contrasting cultures, cruel practices and pagan “fetish” religions. In Wood’s words: “We have, for example, on one side of the river, a people well clothed, well fed, well governed, and retaining but few of the old savage customs. On the other side, we find people without clothes, government, manners, or morality, and sunk as deeply as man can be in all the squalid miseries of savage life.” In a discussion of Dahome, Wood complained that the West African had not been uplifted by his association with Europeans, “men wiser and more powerful” than himself. Instead, he had “only increased his barbarity by the additional means which he obtained from the white man.”

    DeGraft-Johnson expressed a different opinion: “Tribes had to supply slaves or be sold as slaves themselves, for this was the age of the gangster. Violence, brutality, and ferocity became the necessities of survival, for generosity and good neighborliness had lost their meaning.”