election day

I was surprised to see that Beagles had nothing to say about a Daley running for president.  I don't think he keeps close tabs on Chicago elections, but maybe he just assumes there would always be a Daley running, and he is not far off about that.  Wiki surprises.me by telling me that the first mayor Daley was elected in 1955.  I would have thought that he had been mayor since before I was born.

My family left Chicago for exotic Chattanooga Tennessee shortly after I was born, and we returned here in 1949, so I had like six years of no Mayor Daley, but I wasn't paying too much attention to politics at that early age, though I decidedly liked Ike.

I remember when the Daley signs went up.  It seems like people taped them to their doors, I don't remember yard signs.  Our neighborhood was founded in the 20's so we were like newcomers there, and I looked with reverence at the homes with the Daley signs.  They most know people, they must have some relative on the city payroll, they must be connected, the next time garbage cans were passed out they surely got the shiniest ones.


Of course most of the people going into the rain forest are going there to live, much as our forebears broke through the Appalachians to the fertile valleys of the midwest.  That's why it's hard to talk them out of it, saying we did it but you shouldn't.  The situation is more dire now and the Brazilian rainforest is a mightier lung than the midwest ever was and that Alaskan permafrost is melting quickly,  Likely Beagles would need a pea green swamp buggy these days.

Whatever happened to birth control?  It used to be a big controversy, and now you never hear about it.  I take that back, the reps are fighting to have employers who claim to be against it not pay their insurance companies to cover birth control.  In a not unrelated matter I read the other day that there is only one legal place to get an abortion in the state of Missouri.  Don't throw out those old clothes hangers yet.


There were maybe five people ahead of me at the polling place downstairs.  I selected my candidate for mayor and for city treasurer and was surprised that we were also voting for city clerk,  Why had I not read of this or seen some commercial about it?  I picked randomly.  But then the damn voting machine, the thing you slide that big cardboard ballot through, wasn't working.  The clerks fiddled with it and nada.  People had to go to work and were getting impatient.  Eventually they had us slide them through a slot in a big metal cabinet.  Well I'm sure that they eventually went to the right place.