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Thursday, May 31, 2018

give em hell Harry

Back from Missouri.  Ate and drank of course and met up with some beer-drinking Champaign  buddies and saw the home museum of Donald Hart Benton, and the Harry S Truman presidential library.

In the case Gorsuch ruled on the arbitrators referred to in the contract would all be selected by the company.  The decision would always go the company's way.

I have to say that I wasn't aware that Memorial Day had previously been celebrated on Mondays.  I guess that's because I never had a job with paid holidays until 1985.  If you don't get the day off from work it's just another day.  I liked holidays on Mondays because not only did you get a three day weekend, it  was followed by a four day weekend,  I suspect the reason they moved holidays to Mondays was because if it fell on a Tuesday or Thursday, a lot of people didn't show up for work on Mondays or Thursdays.  What I don't get is MLK and Presidents Day in the middle of the winter, they should move them to July and August respectively.

How about that Harry?  I guess the main things we remember about him are his holding up that Trib with the headline about Dewey defeating him, and of course, the atomic bomb.  Some controversy about the latter, but I'm inclined to give him a pass, the war was still going on after all.  Many more civilians were killed in fire bombings, but that atom bomb certainly got attention and ended the war quickly. 

There were long halls of cases, blow ups of documents and photos of the time, memorabilia, explanatory texts, growing up a farm boy, trying to impress the upper-crust Bess, much was made of the love story between him and Bess, trying to impress her by making money so they wouldn't have to live on that farm in the middle of nowhere, but risky investments came a cropper.  He was an artillery captain in WW I (not quite sure how he got that rank, he had been in the national guard and ?I guess he worked his way up), acquitted himself well and won her hand, but subsequent business ventures, most prominent among them that haberdashery, did not go well.  It wasn't until the Pendergasts, needing a non-Irish, non-catholic soldier in their ranks made him a deal that his star began to rise.  He kept himself fairly clean but did truck with political bosses. 

He rose to senator, and when FDR looked like he wouldn't make it through his fourth term and Henry Wallace was kind of commie and kind of nuts, so Truman got to be veep and then prez.  Then the atom bomb, the end of the hot war and the beginning of the cold war, Korea, the forgotten war, that McArthur affair, and then we liked Ike, and Harry was keeping a low profile in Independence Missouri until that book Plain Speaking came out and Nixon being prez people looked fondly on him.

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