The 2016 SPEEDY Awards

Hard to believe that it is that time again, but it is time for our annual Speedy Awards. We have somewhere around 7,146 members of the Speedy Awards Commission, but my vote is the only one that counts, so who really cares about all those other people?

NEWS STORY OF THE YEAR: America’s two leading political parties each nominated a candidate for president that nobody liked. Then America got mad when one of those candidates won.

SPORTS STORY OF THE YEAR: Cubs win!! Cubs win!!

Runnerup: Mickey Dale is elected to the Imperial Valley High School Football Coaches Hall of Fame for his media work.

IT’S CONFUSING BUT THIS IS MY BLOG AND NOT YOURS TEAM OF THE YEAR AWARD: The Alabama Crimson Tide for winning the 2016 national football championship game.

HOLY HEADACHE AWARD: To NASCAR driver Dale Earnhart Jr. for sitting out much of the season with concussion symptoms and then winning NASCAR’s Most Popular Driver Award again anyway. That’s like a pitcher winning the Cy Young Award without pitching after the All-Star game.

GONNA MISS ‘EM AWARD: To announcers Vin Scully and Vern Lundquist, who retired in 2016. Gonna miss those voices.

ORGANIZER OF THE YEAR AWARD: To Amy Elder, President of the Tallmadge, Ohio Primetimers Club.

THE STEVE YOUNG MONKEY OFF HIS BACK AWARD: To drag racer Ron Capps for winning the NHRA Funny Car World Championship. Capps would have been elected to most racing Halls of Fame anyway after his racing days are over, but now he is a world champ and we can’t imagine any Hall that would ignore his career. Well done.

DEAD ON ARRIVAL AWARD: The Damn Good Colleague Award has been awarded to six public relations representatives in the drag racing industry. Five of the six either lost or left their jobs within two months of winning the award. One of the five managed to return to drag racing later the following season. The award has been discontinued.

SEASON OF THE YEAR AWARD: To Winter for not showing up in Northeastern Ohio.

WORST DECISION OF THE YEAR AWARD: To the San Diego Chargers for deciding to move to Los Angeles. The decision was made in 2016, we are sure. The Chargers want to play in a bigger stadium so they might end up playing on a 32,000-seat soccer field for a while. There are high schools stadiums in Texas that hold more fans. Little Eddie used to say it on the Zachery All commercials, “That just don’t make sense.”

A Bad Day for Mother

          During the Civil War, the Confederate Army had a policy of grouping soldiers from specific locations together in companies. For example, the soldiers Company A of a given regiment might all have been from a given county in Alabama. The idea was that the soldiers were more likely to serve honorably if each man knew that if he was accused of cowardice, if he stole the possessions of the other soldiers or if he deserted, the word would get back home and that soldier would be treated accordingly at home.

          You might remember the famous quote from Joshua L. Chamberlain, commander of the 20^th Maine during its legendary defense of the Union left flank on Little Round Top during the battle of Gettysburg. Chamberlain instructed his brother, Tom, to move to the other side of the regiment when the shooting started. Joshua Chamberlain said famously that if the brothers stood together, one Confederate bullet could get lucky and then it would, “be a bad day for mother.”

          Jump ahead roughly 10 weeks and another mother did have a bad day.

          Ancil (or Ansel) Lee, Jackson Lee and Martin Lee were brothers serving in Company A of the Fourth Battalion in Hilliard’s Legion, an Alabama outfit. During the battle of Chickamauga, the Legion fought as part of Brigadier General Archibald Gracie’s Brigade and was a part of the famous charge up Horseshoe Ridge September 20, 1863. The attack was among the bloodiest of the entire war. Gracie’s Brigade attacked with 1,782 men. 92 of those men were killed and 618 more were wounded. The Fourth Battalion alone lost 15 killed and 87 wounded for a total of 102 casualties out of 205 members who started up the side of that Ridge. Eight of the wounded later died of their wounds.

          And two of the dead were brothers Jackson and Martin Lee. The Lees were from Butler County, Alabama. Jackson was about 29 when he died and Martin was two years younger. It was a bad day for their mother.

          Statistics like the number of men who fell attacking or defending that Ridge can be ugly to look at, but those stats are still just numbers. When you add names to those statistics, such as Privates Jackson Lee and Martin Lee, then the numbers start to mean something.

          The Fourth Battalion was on the left side of Gracie’s attacking line and Company D was likely the second company from the left within the Fourth. As the assault began, the Fourth had to stop and lay on its arms as another regiment, which had attacked the same Ridge earlier, pulled back. As a result, according to the commanding officer of the Fourth, the battalion’s momentum was slowed. Of the Legion’s four battalions, the Fourth was the lone member that did not reach the top of the Ridge. Eventually, its ammunition spent, the Fourth pulled back off that bloody hillside. Gracie’s Brigade, which included two regiments plus the Legion, carried the day for the Confederates, moving the Union defenders off of their defensive positions and taking the hill.

Only one of the three Lees knew of the victory. His brothers died fighting for a cause that we know today was both flawed and terrible. The intent here is not to praise the Confederate cause. Slavery remains an ugly fact of American history and we are well rid of it, even if bigotry remains as a blot on our society that also needs eliminating.

Still, I can’t help but think of the bad day in Butler County when so many families got the bad news that their loved ones were killed or maimed. War is a terrible thing. If we really want to rid ourselves of the curse of battle, we need our young to understand what war is. Teach them the history and they’ll get the message: This is what happens when cooler heads do not prevail.

           Thanks for reading.

Stats, Facts and Disease

          Statistics tell you information. They tell you simple facts that can frequently be bent to your will to win an argument or be used the same way to prove you wrong. They tell you something but they don’t tell you a story.

          When you read that three quarters of all Civil War deaths were due to disease, it tells you what happened but it does not tell you the story. In today’s antiseptic world, the idea of that many deaths of young and previously healthy people to the ravages of disease seems preposterous. But it happened and the dead piled up. If you accept the death toll of the Civil War as 600,000 soldiers, then roughly 450,000 men died of disease during that conflict.

          Hilliard’s Legion was an Alabama outfit that was raised by Henry Washington Hilliard, a famous politician of antebellum Alabama. The Legion originally included five battalions of soldiers, one of which was an artillery unit and another a cavalry unit. The cavalry battalion was transferred and merged with a Georgia outfit to become the 10^th Confederate Cavalry Regiment and is thus removed from this discussion.

          The rest of the Legion was raised between March and July of 1862, roughly 3,000 men split into four battalions. A part of the artillery battalion became an independent command but the remainder of the artillery battalion fought as infantry.

          And as soon as they came together in Montgomery, Alabama in the summer of 1862, the Legionaires started dying.

          A sample from the Third Battalion, one of the Legion’s three original infantry battalions: Private of Company B Miles Thrower enlisted April 7, 1862 and died just more than two months later on June 12. Irwin Raley, a private in the same company as Thrower, enlisted the same day as Thrower but died earlier, on June 7.

          Jones Roberts was a Private in Company C, enlisting April 5, 1862. He died October 20. Jesse Smith was a 23-year-old when he enlisted on May 3 of that year and was placed in Company C. He died October 25.

          Hilliard’s Legion did not see combat until September 20, 1863 at Chickamauga, about 18 months after the Legion was formed. Plenty of its members died during the attack on Horseshoe Ridge at Chickamauga but those deaths were different. The Legion’s dead at Horseshoe Ridge were the result of rifle fire.

          The diseases that thinned the ranks of the Legion and Civil War armies on both sides were due to poor sanitary conditions and other like issues that we have mostly eradicated today. The leading killer in Civil War camps was dysentery and it is difficult to think of a more miserable killer. But there were other maladies that killed.

          Still in the Third Battalion, Privates James B. Cox, James M. Graves and Raley all died of the measles. Private Green B. Knowles’ cause of death is listed as Brain Fever.

          We don’t have the exact enlistment date for Van B. Tomme, a Private in Company B, but he enlisted that spring and died the following June 12. John H. Townsend, a private in C Company, enlisted in May and died in December.

          Your Loyal Blogger has bolded the names of the soldiers to emphasize the point that this is a human story. We do not like the Rebel cause today, and for good reason. But the men on the other side of the Civil War, the soldiers in the Union army, suffered the same hardships and died of the same diseases.

          The American Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. The war and the resulting amendments to our Constitution ended slavery in our part of North America, thank Goodness. Slavery and the end of slavery were the primary cause and effect of the war. A less-discussed result of the Civil War was a better understanding of the importance of mass sanitation. Society benefitted from what we learned about getting rid of sewage and human waste.

          It is true that statistics are facts, but not all facts are statistics. Some facts are human stories.

          Thanks for reading.

Upcoming Civil War Institute

          The schedule for the 2017 Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College is online at http://www.gettysburg.edu/cwi/conference/schedule.dot and next year’s program will be a great one. Your Loyal Blogger is irritated that the event is still better than half a year away.

          Readers can view the program through the link above so there is no point in reprinting the sked here but there isn’t much point to writing a blog without expressing an opinion. Thus, a few points are offered.

          James Ogden, the National Park Service Historian at the Chickamauga/Chattanooga National Military Park and a favorite of this blogger, will speak about the siege of Chattanooga following the Battle of Chickamauga. This is going to be a great talk. Few historians, if there are any at all, have mastered their subject as well as Ogden has his.

          Penn State University’s Carol Reardon, whose book Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory stands among the finest books YLB has read, regardless of subject, will lead a tour of Antietam and serve on a panel that will discuss myths about Civil War battle tactics.

          Every once in a while historians need a new idea to write about. The reputations of historic figures ebb and flow because of that. This could become true for Confederate General Braxton Bragg, who has been a punch line for an endless number of  one-liners (or cheap shots, depending upon your view point) through the years. YLB sees Bragg’s tenure as commander of the Army of Tennessee as a failure of leadership style, but also believes many of Bragg’s problems stemmed from having officers in his army who frequently didn’t feel like following orders. Thus, Earl Hess’ presentation, Rethinking Braxton Bragg, promises to be fascinating.

          You can read the schedule yourself and see that the Institute will be another winner next year. Interested? The contact info is available through the link. Hope to see you there.

          Thanks for reading.

Jim Bowie, a soldering iron and a finger in the eye: My day with docs

          The question is pretty much always the same but you don’t like to ask it of yourself. You wait until the question is right in front of you, asking itself in loud, belligerent terms: Can you handle it?

          When you’re young, loud and ignorant, the answer is that of course you can handle it. Head a little further down the road, maybe reaching your thirties, and you answer, “Yeah, sure, I guess so.” And when your hair has more grey than any other color, your answer is always, “What choice do I have? I’ll handle it.”

          In the case of Your Loyal Blogger the answer is usually a little different: The answer is usually, “I don’t want to handle it.” Unfortunately for YLB, this is not a legitimate answer and that’s the bad news.

          The good news is that Mrs. Leeway usually says something like, “You idiot, go see a doctor,” and then the whole question of dealing with it comes into play.

          Yesterday, in the final moments before my surgeon began sticking, carving and, yes, burning my nose, I told her that I am not good with needles or knives. She immediately jammed a needle into my face and said, “Little pinch.” She moved from spot to spot, leaving some finger or other jammed into my right eye as she numbed the targeted area with needles and some kind of buzz juice, which medical professionals term a, “numbing agent.”

          Then the three docs all walked out for a while, probably to double-check on our insurance company, which nobody in the office had ever heard of. Back came the Doctoral Trio and, I have to assume, out came the knives. Truth be told, you don’t feel much if the buzz juice has done its job. A little pressure where the carving is under way and the standard finger in the eyeball, but not much else.

          Once the carving was done, the burning was next and that seemed odd. In the kitchen, I usually burn things before I start carving them. Not so in this case. The boss doctor pulled out a soldering iron, or what looked like one, and started cauterizing (med-speak for burning) the open wound in order to stem the flow of blood.

          You know you’ve lived a full life when you hear and smell your own flesh sizzle. I commented on the matter at about the time the cook-off reached its zenith, but got no reaction at all from the three medical professionals in the room. The women to whom I had entrusted my health and well-being. The surgeons.

          Geez, one fake laugh at that moment might have been nice.

          They slapped some gauze and tape across the offended nose and sent me out to sit with Mrs. Leeway while they inspected and detected the piece of my flesh they had removed, then called me back for more needles, knives and soldering irons. More jabbing, cutting and, of course, burning.

This time they were not fooling around. They gave me so much buzz juice that my upper teeth went numb. “Too bad none of you are dentists,” I said. “My teeth are numb.” In response, they dropped a bigger piece of paper over my face, jammed a finger in my eye and resumed the Jim Bowie treatment to my face.

“We’re going to move closer to your eye this time,” the boss surgeon said. I was confident my eye would be safe. Her finger was still planted smack on top of it. To damage the eye, she’d have to cut her own finger.

More digging, more burning. At one point I felt something and mentioned it, generating a brief, “Um hum,” from the boss doc. It seemed like a breakthrough after the humorless silent treatment I’d been getting.

They sent me out to the lobby a second time while they turned my flesh into another science project. I reread the six-month old edition of Sports Illustrated I’d gone through the last time they sent me out. It was still full of old news.

Finally they called me back with the good news that they had gotten all the bad stuff out of my face and that it was now time for the sewing. I asked how many stiches I’d need and they told me that it was really just one because they were going to sew me up like a baseball, one continuous string. Some would be under the skin, some visible. The stuff would dissolve in time and there would be minimal scaring.

Now, Your Loyal Blogger has had stitches before, but this was the first time the old baseball stitch has been used. None of the educated professionals in the room (other than me) were aware that Vin Scully is retiring or what that means. They were somehow aware that the Cleveland Indians had clinched a playoff berth. But they did not seem to link these comments with their own comment about the baseball stitch they were about to perform on Your Loyal Blogger’s face.

By that time, I didn’t care. They’d put the soldering iron down and that was good enough for me. On the way home, I regaled Mrs. Leeway with tales of the operating room and she said, “I think I hear a blog coming.” She was right, as usual.

Thanks for reading and, please do yourself a favor: Use lots of sunscreen and wear a hat when outdoors.