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HOW I BECAME A PROTESTANT
It would be a great source of regret it any reader were to conclude from the title of this essay, that this is a religious piece. Banish the thought. Quite to the contrary, this vignette is an Army story. When we reach the latter stages of this inquiry, there will be a denouement that will…
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TAKE ME OUT TO THE AFRICAN BALL GAME
The title of this essay is a bit misleading because at the time this game took place, Africans played no baseball at all. On the other hand, it is a celebration of a game played by GI’s late in 1944 or 1945 between two clubs whose managers disliked each other with such intensity as to…
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ARMY SERIAL NUMBER (ASN) 17077613
If one were inclined to study a map of the United States, he would discover that in the middle Western part, there is a river that flows from the north and winds up in New Orleans. That of course is the mighty Mississippi, which was celebrated in 1927 by Jerome Kern’s production of Showboat. In…
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IN DEFENSE OF BUTTONS
It is possible but unlikely that there are men and women around the world whose memory is so long that they can remember a time when the existence of zippers was completely unknown. Zippers today appear in a multiplicity of places. They are on our clothes as well as on some of our plastic bags…
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TO GIVE ONE BIG FAT RAT’S ASS
Over the years I have been a big consumer of sports news. Specifically, I have followed the fortunes of the New York Mets and before that the St. Louis Cardinals. When the fall and the winter came, I followed some of the St. Louis college teams but after the war, I was much interested in…
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ESCORTS VS. PLAIN OLD PROSTITUTION (POP)
I do not intend to claim great expertise in the field of escorts or in the field of plain old prostitution. What brings all of this to mind is an incident earlier in April of this year wherein some Secret Service agents had a soiree in Cartagena, Colombia and then invited the women to their…