Louisiana Voice

Five of Louisiana’s House members apparently have no problem with the rash of attacks on Asian-Americans just as the same five don’t see any reason to investigate the Jan. 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters that left feces on corridor walls, widespread vandalism, and five people dead.

Never mind that Congressional Repugnantcans spent more time investigating Benghazi than it did 9/11. (Don’t believe me? Click HERE.)

House Resolution 275 called for the condemning of the “horrific shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 16, 2021, and reaffirming the House of Representative’s commitment to combating hate, bigotry, and violence against the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community.”

Democrat Troy Carter voted for the resolution which passed the full House by a 245-180 vote. Only 30 Republicans voted in favor of the resolution.

Neither Steve Scalise, Clay Higgins, Mike Johnson, Julia Letlow nor Garret Graves, Repugnantcans one and all, were among those 30.

So, what would be the harm in those who make our laws coming together, regardless of party affiliation, to condemn the spate of violence against Asian-Americans?

Beats the hell out of me, but Louisiana’s five Repugnantcans just couldn’t bring themselves to display enough spine to stand up for human rights and against the incomprehensible mentality of inflicting harm on others because of the color of their skin.

Unless, of course, the Repugnantcan Party at some point decided that it was no longer the Party of Lincoln, but the Party of Bigotry, which, come to think of it, isn’t that much of a stretch.

It also may be the Party of Anarchy.

Those same five Repugnantcans joined 170 other Repugnantcans in voting against House Resolution 3233, the “National Commission to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol Complex Act.

HR 3233 passed by a 252-175 vote, with 35 Repugnantcans voting with 217 Democrats in favor of the resolution.

And again, the Louisiana Five were not among those 35. The only yea vote from Louisiana again came from Democrat Troy Carter.

You think maybe the Repugnantcans were that hesitant to vote in favor of investigating Benghazi in an effort to bury Hillary Clinton? Not on your life.

Without going into the merits or lack of for Clinton, it’s worthwhile to note that Congress, led by Repugnantcans frothing at the mouth, spent two years and four months investigating the deaths of four people at the U.S. embassy in Libya. In case anyone’s forgotten, five died as a result of the Capitol insurrection.

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” Rep. Kevin McCarthy said back in 2016. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today?” That’s the same Kevin McCarthy who now wants no part of a Jan. 6 investigation.

But 28 months investigating Benghazi? That’s longer than congressional investigations into 9/11, Watergate, the JFK assignation or Pearl Harbor.

But Scalise, Higgins, Johnson, Letlow and Graves just couldn’t see the need to investigate how a screaming horde with nooses, guns, a bomb or two, and God knows what else was goaded by the former guy into storming the Capitol screaming about hanging Mike Pence, killing Nancy Pelosi and other members while actually killing one police officer.

Some “tourist stroll” that was.

The Fantastic Five just couldn’t bring themselves to probe how an orange-toupeed, con man managed to coax thousands of rabid followers to Washington to wreak havoc and to even kill a Capitol police officer, why members of the active military were among the rioters, why the U.S. Capitol was breached so easily and how any of the members under siege at that time could possibly equate the maniacal lunatics to a group of tourists strolling through the Capitol.

There are only two possible explanations. The five are (a) cowards who are deathly afraid of Trump, Jim Johnson, Devin Nunes, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Josh Hawley, Madison Cawthorn, Clay Higgins, Steve Scalise, John N. Kennedy, Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Matt Gaetz, Mitch McConnell and the other mouth-breathers who somehow got themselves elected to the House or Senate, or (b) are themselves advocates of violence, discord, and lawlessness.

Whichever the case, be assured that these people do not represent the values and principles this country stands for as set out in the U.S. Constitution – a document they’ve likely never read.

Unfortunately, they likely do represent their respective constituents, the people who put them in office.

And therein lies the problem.

As someone said long before I first wrote it in a column, we get the government we deserve.

Politics is cyclical. The pendulum swings both ways and the national mood will shift.

Those who deride a free press are seeing what happens in countries like Belarus when a reporter dares speak out against the country’s leader. That’s the kind of state-sanctioned terrorist acts against a dissident reporter that Trump so admires but one day, his supporters of today will sit back and wonder whatever possessed them to vote for such a monster. Only the hardest of the hard-core supporters will continue in their unquestioning blind loyalty.

One day, Congress will be rid of parasites like the aforementioned architects of the modern Repugnantcan Party.

We can only hope it won’t be too late.

The City of Baton Rouge has quietly agreed to pay $35,000 to the Clarence Green family of Baton Rouge to settle a civil rights lawsuit against a team of Baton Rouge police officers, according to attorney Thomas Frampton, who represented the family in their legal action against the city.

Frampton is associate professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law.

In the span of 90 minutes on January 1, 2020, the police officers stripped Clarence Green and his 16-year-old brother on a public street, GROPED THEIR GENITALS as part of a “frisk,” illegally entered the Green family’s apartment (with one officer drawing his gun), and repeatedly threated to beat a handcuffed and defenseless Clarence Green (“I’m going to come in [to the backseat of the police car] and f**k you up! You think I’m playing with you? I will f**k you up! I will f**k you clean up!”). The threats were captured on the officers’ body- cam.

The lead officer involved, Sgt. Ken Camallo, was criticized U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson by a federal judge after he testified about the New Year’s Day events. Judge Jackson said the officers “demonstrated a serious and wanton disregard for [Clarence Green’s] constitutional rights, first by initiating a traffic stop on the thinnest of pretext, and then by haphazardly invading [his] home (weapons drawn) to conduct an unjustified, warrantless search.”

The video depicts an “abject violation of the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment” and “may justifiably be considered” criminal, Judge Jackson said, noting that Camallo “gave multiple conflicting accounts when describing the circumstances leading up to defendant’s traffic stop, and failed to offer a satisfactory explanation for why the police reports in this investigation were revised nearly a dozen times in the months following Green’s arrest.

The officer’s testimony was troubling at best, and the court was prepared to make a credibility determination” had the criminal case against Green been dismissed.

In 2017, in an unrelated case, a different federal judge found that Camallo testified falsely concerning the circumstances another illegal and warrantless home search. BRPD did not discipline Camallo after that incident, Frampton said. The residences in the 2017 case and the 2020 case are around the corner from one another.

Despite the incident with Green occurring over 14 months ago, only one of the five officers involved – Camallo – has faced any internal discipline. Other officers involved but unpunished by BRPD included Officer Troy Lawrence, Jr., believed to be the son of BRPD Deputy Chief Troy Lawrence, Sr.

As usual, none of the officers paid any of the settlement personally; taxpayers are footing the bill.

“The video is horrifying,” Frampton said. “It shows a form of ritualized humiliation and contempt for civil rights that, based on the lack of response from BRPD and District Attorney Hillar Moore, apparently has official sanction. These aren’t bad apples; there are some of the best officers on the force. It’s a miracle someone didn’t get killed . . . this time.”

On Wednesday of this week, I was eating dinner at a Denham Springs restaurant when two elderly couples entered the dining room. The message stenciled across the front of one of the men’s T-shirt immediately made my blood boil and had my wife not been with me, I probably would have some choice words for the cretin wearing the shirt.

Now, I am all about freedom of expression and as a general principle, am opposed to censorship of any description. But despite my belief in freedom of speech, I was immediately irate over the shirt’s message: DEFUND the MEDIA.

Whether he is aware of it or not (and he likely is oblivious), the media have already been defunded. Don’t believe it? Check the size of your local newspaper against what it was say, 10-15 years ago. Check the content of publications like The Shreveport Times, Monroe News-Star, Alexandria Town Talk, etc. to see what has happened to the print media. The New Orleans Times-Picayune ceased to exist after it had cut back to publishing three days a week. The Bastrop Enterprise shuttered its doors a few years back. Weekly and small dailies have been shrunken to mere shadows of their old selves – all because of defunding necessitated by the medium by which you are reading this: the Internet. So, I guess I am part of the problem but at least I never wanted to see newspapers die. That was, after all, the way I made my living for most of my adult life.

The old redneck is entitled to his opinion, but I have to wonder if he has ever considered what a world without the media might be like. Whether you agree with the message or not, it is critical that citizens of a democracy be kept informed about what their government is doing or not doing. The Washington Post‘s slogan, splashed across its masthead, proclaims, “Democracy dies in darkness.” LouisianaVoice‘s own masthead says, “It is understandable when a child is afraid of the dark but unforgivable when a man fears the light.”

You may not like the news you read (I deliberately omit TV news coverage because of the brevity of its stories, reduced as they are to 15-second soundbites). But as one reporter for the old Baton Rouge State-Times asked an irate caller during the hectic days of the Watergate scandal, “What have you learned about Richard Nixon that you’d rather not have known?”

Take, for example, the series of stories initiated by LouisianaVoice about an outfit in my hometown of Ruston: LASALLE CORRECTIONS. It all started with a whistleblower complaint that a LaSalle-run facility in GEORGIA was performing unwanted hysterectomies on female detainees.

On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it had instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to terminate its contract with two facilities that housed immigration detainees: the BRISTOL COUNTY (Massachusetts) Sheriff’s Office and the IRWIN COUNTY DETENTION CENTER in Ocilla, Georgia.

The Irwin County facility is the one operated by LaSalle against which the WHISTLEBLOWER COMPLAINT was lodged last September by Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network.

Of course, the Georgia detention center is not the only troubled facility operated under the auspices of LaSalle. It pulled out of the TEXARKANA jail after numerous violations and lawsuits.

None of this would have ever come to light without the media.

As if those examples aren’t enough, there is the matter of RONALD GREENE and the Louisiana State Police.

Were it not for the dogged pursuit of this story, a gang of over-zealous state troopers in Monroe might never have been investigated for the death of Greene or the COVERUP that ensued.

Commenting on the release of the graphic video of Green’s final moments, Gov. John Bel Edwards lamented, “The entities that are doing the investigation, US Department of Justice and the District Attorney, haven’t yet completed the investigation. They renewed their request that the video not be made public, and that’s why the state police haven’t done it.”

Really, Governor? This occurred two years ago. How long does it take to conduct an investigation? George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police a year ago and the officer who held him down with his knee until he was dead was indicted, tried and convicted last month – 11 months after Floyd’s death. And we’re still “investigating” the Greene death two years later, with no indictments?

It’s bad enough that the state police are attempting to make this go away quietly without the state’s chief executive allowing himself to become complicit in the attempt.

State police have consistently refused to release the VIDEO of the tragic event, citing the same excuse as Edwards: that it was still “under investigation.” The media were asking for video of the apprehension, tasing, beating and ultimate killing of yet another black man who admittedly fled police who attempted to pull him over.

The source of the video is still unknown, but it was not from state police.

When Greene struck a tree, ending the chase, he exited his vehicle, saying, “I’m sorry” and “I’m scared.”

The ultimate lie, for which no one has yet been charged, was the claim by state police that Greene was killed in the auto accident, which the video clearly shows was not the case. That alone should be grounds for an obstruction of justice indictment.

That was a lie for which someone must be held accountable. But it’s been two years and the only trooper disciplined, subsequently was killed in a one-car collision, a victim, some say, of an apparent suicide after he had been given a termination letter from state police – 14 months after Greene’s death and only then because of media inquiries.

Two years is too damned long, but rest assured, without an aggressive media determined to get to the root of this story, it would have remained buried.

To the uninformed, obstinate, narrow-minded man who strutted so proudly through the restaurant in that T-shirt, a message: You can defund the media but when you do, you castrate democracy.

If you are hellbent on watching a sh*t show featuring a cast of complete idiots who would rather spew their own misinformed brand of Trumpism than to give any consideration to science, I give you the Louisiana Legislature.

How people like Valerie Hodges got elected to the House is beyond my comprehension. This woman is the Livingston Parish version of Marjorie Taylor Greene – full of crackpot opinions, but woefully short of common sense.

This is the same nutcase who back in the Dark Ages of the Bobby Jindal administration, voted in favor of Ruston’s New Living Word school which was founded on the principle of teaching creationism on DVDs. She likewise had no problem with “teaching the fundamentals of America’s Founding Fathers’ religion, which is Christianity, in public schools or private schools.”

Somewhere along the line, as observed by writer Jarvis DeBerry, she overlooked that little part of the Constitution that says government should take a hands-off policy in favoring one religion (Christianity, for example) over another like say, Judaism – or even supporting the religious over agnostics or atheists.  

But she did apparently have a big problem in 2012 when the director of a Muslim school in the New Orleans area voiced interest in the state’s voucher program that Hodges had championed on its way to passage. She went absolutely bonkers, proclaiming the voucher program was intended for “Christian schools.” Can you say “double standard”? Hodges certainly can.

Fast forward nine years and she’s baaaaack.

To first put things in perspective, it’s important to know that there is a dedicated horde of Trump supporters who bought into his stolen election B.S., who subscribed to the shopworn rhetoric of Qanon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Andrew Clyde and others who would have us believe the Jan. 6 anarchy in the U.S. Capitol was nothing more than tourists strolling through the People’s House.

With the notable exception of that concentrated knot of holdouts in Arizona who continue to insist on yet another recount of the November election results, these devotees are slowly coming to realization that the election was on the level and will not be overturned. Thus frustrated in their anger and disappointment, they have but one bullet left in their gun: distrust of science in the face of 582,000 pandemic deaths in this country alone.

And so it would be that on May 17, people like Hodges and Rep. Beryl Amedee (R-Houma) would make complete fools of themselves arguing with those who have dedicated their lives and reputations to the study of science that COVID vaccinations constitute a gigantic hoax, a notion perpetrated by a bunch of whackos who have no business trying to tell the rest of us how to think and act – but they do.

The issue was HB 103 by Rep. Danny McCormick (R-Oil City) which would protect businesses from liability for failing to mandate masks for employees or customers. Never mind that an employer just might wish to protect her staff and herself from your coughing and sneezing.

Of course, they were duly elected by their constituents so I suppose it’s true we get the government we deserve. But when their warped views endanger my safety, it is my right to speak up against such ass-clowns.

What gives Valerie Hodges the right to sit up there on the House Committee on Civil Law and Procedure and tell us that she knows a person who knows a doctor who advised patients not to take the COVID vaccine because they could get “very, very sick and possibly die from it”?

Here’s a news flash for you, Valerie: I know a person who knows a doctor who said if you contract COVID, you can get “very, very sick and possibly die from it.” That makes every bit as much sense as your gibberish.

Hodges says she’s afraid the U.S. might require vaccines for certain forms of travel. But, but, but… don’t we already have to have certain vaccinations before we can travel abroad, Valerie? Huh? Huh, Valerie? Isn’t that right?

Travel to Mexico does not legally require vaccinations, but it is highly recommended that travelers to that country obtain shots for chickenpox, diphtheria, flu, measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), polio. The question here is, Valerie, did you have those vaccinations when you served as a missionary in Mexico? We would all be interested in knowing the answer to that. I’m betting you did.

And Rep. Amedee. Now there’s a real piece of work. She’s what Kris Kristofferson would call a “walkin’ contradiction” in his song The Pilgrim. Amedee, an anti-vaxxer to the max, supports the argument of an unidentified woman who testified before the committee on Monday, saying, “It’s my body, my right. And I have the right to say no.”

Don’t believe me? Well, her Facebook page contains a photo of and a “BIG SHOUT OUT” to a billboard in support of HB 579 “which is written to prevent state and local government-managed health procedures. Even the vaccines required for Students to enroll in school come with an opt-out provision for those who may have medical, religious, or philosophical objections. Where there is risk, there MUST be choice!”

The billboard she was alluding to proclaimed, “Who Owns Your Body? Government or You?” That sounds a lot like what the pro-choice advocates have been saying for years now.

But that very same Facebook page also contained a celebratory shot of the House vote tabulation on Amedee’s HB 578, which was passed by a 71-27 vote by the full House. HB 578, the so-called Abortion Pill Reversal Disclosure bill, would require that a disclosure statement by added to the website of the Louisiana Department of Health’s website warning that the mifepristone pill is not always effective in ending pregnancies.

It seems a bit inconsistent that one who so adamantly pro-choice with vaccinations is just as passionately anti- choice when the subject is still control over one’s body.

Amedee, whose educational background has led her to ownership of an ERRAND SERVICE, pitted her vast scientific knowledge gleaned from that glorified delivery service enterprise against the obviously inadequate background of Angelle Bradford, a cardiovascular physiology student from New Orleans who testified as to what science shows in support of vaccines. Amedee told Bradford her education wasn’t giving her the full picture because the official information on vaccines has been “slanted and propagandized.” I wonder if she learned that while house-watching for a vacationing family or as a welcome wagon hostess.

Subscribing to sputterings of Qanon, Donald Trump and outfits like the Proud Boys would doubtless be getting the “full picture.” No bias or propaganda there.

So, go ahead, Louisiana. Keep electing these miscreants.

We deserve the government we get.

It was somewhere around April 1945 when my mother decided to pack up and leave my dad and Galveston, Texas, to join her parents and siblings in the Pacific Northwest, namely Washington State.

I can’t really blame her for calling her marriage to my dad quits. He was not the best provider for his children. In fact, he was more of a sperm donor: make babies and move on. I have brothers and sisters I don’t even know and to this day, I can think of only one Christmas gift my dad ever gave me: a cheap watch that broke the second week I had it. He would eventually end up marrying five times to four different women (my mother twice).

But when my mom loaded up her belongings and my older sister and headed north by northwest, she forgot one thing: me. I’m not judging; she did what she felt she had to do at the time, but she left me behind in a Galveston hospital, suffering from malnutrition (as I said, my dad wasn’t much of a provider). She did send a postcard to her father-in-law in Ruston, T.E. “Ed” Aswell, to inform him that I was in “a hospital” in Galveston. She neglected to say which one.

My grandfather immediately drove to Galveston and after battling the bureaucracy of two different hospitals (Galveston had only two at the time), was finally shown into the ward where I was. He told me many times that he would never forget seeing that frail, undernourished baby at the foot of his bed, clinging to the railing in order to stand. “His eyes were the biggest thing about him,” he remembered.

It took a pretty good battle, I’m told, for him to convince hospital staff that he was taking me home with him – something about there not not being a cow left in Texas if he didn’t get to walk out with me. But that’s how I came to live with my paternal grandparents until I married the love of my life, Betty, 52 years ago.

He and my grandmother were the best things that could’ve happened to a skinny, 18-month-old baby who was staring down the barrel of a lifetime of foster care until they intervened. God only knows where I might have ended up without their decision to take me in. I never called them Grandma and Grandpa. That would have been oh so wrong, for they were the only Mom and Dad I ever knew. That’s who they were – Mom and Dad.

They provided the moral compass, compassion, discipline and overall guidance a kid must have until Betty came along a couple of decades later to relieve them of that onus. I’m still a work in progress and Betty’s doing the best she can but I know how to say yes ma’am, yes sir, no ma’am, no sir, please and thank you.

We were poor by anyone’s standards – then or now – but three things I never lacked: love, shelter and food in my belly. My grandfather was a tough man. Besides being a truck farmer (he plowed an old mule until he finally saved enough to purchase a used, mostly unreliable Ford tractor), he also traded livestock, butchered hogs for some of the best sausage and ham you ever tasted, and worked as a concrete finisher. That last job was the hardest work I ever saw anyone do. I had to help him from time to time and I’m still in awe that his body held up for that work well into his seventies.

Did I mention he was tough? When my dad picked up a DWI in Monroe and asked my granddad to bail him out of jail, my granddad had two words in response: “Hell, no!” My dad served out a year’s jail sentence but my granddad never wavered. He simply would not, could not, tolerate alcohol – even though he did do a little bootlegging when times were really hard. A Ruston city judge once fined him $10 for bootlegging. When my grandfather refused to pay it, the judge paid it for him. Yes, those were different times.

But while he was tough as nails, he also could be as soft as melted butter.

Once, when I was just a kid back in the ’50s, he was driving in downtown Ruston when he spotted a couple pushing a child (a girl about seven or eight) in a wheelchair. She was wearing leg braces. The fact that they were black or that he’d never seen them before mattered not a whit to him: he stopped right smack dab in the middle of traffic, walked across the street and handed that little girl five dollars that I happen to know he could not afford. He was unable to speak when he got back behind the wheel.

My grandfather was a rarity for his time. He detested, loathed, hated, despised and otherwise abhorred the Klan. I well remember him saying on more than one occasion, “Any sonofabitch who has to hide under a sheet to do his dirty work ain’t a man – he’s a coward.” That little phrase got my skinny butt in a world of trouble a few years later.

He had a couple other adages he would throw out from time to time. He always taught me that every person I meet is a friend until they show they don’t want to be. It’s always that person’s call, he said.

I rode with him once to the old Ruston Oil Mill so he could purchase some feed for his cattle. He met a man on the loading dock and they stood and talked for nearly an hour while I sat in the truck. On the way home, he said somewhat offhandedly, “That fella back there is a liar and a thief.” I couldn’t comprehend why he would have spent so much time talking to someone like that, so I asked, “If he’s a liar and a thief, why were you friends with him?”

He pulled to the side of the road and stopped. He turned and pointed a beefy finger at me and said, “Son, always remember this: you can be friends with anybody as long as you know who they are.” I was about eight or nine at the time and that has stayed with me for nearly 70 years now, a constant reminder whenever I’m tempted to pre-judge someone.

He pulled to the side of the road on one other occasion – also when I was a small child and the event is burned into my brain. He had bought me a Milky Way candy bar and as he drove down the road, I tossed the wrapper out the truck window. I immediately felt a pop on the back of my head. At the end of a dark tunnel, I believe I saw Jesus waving me toward the light. My grandfather never said a word. He didn’t have to. But I knew to get out and retrieve that candy wrapper and to this day, I’ve never thrown so much as a gum wrapper out of my car window.

But he had a sense of humor, as well, and he could neutralize a tense situation with it when need be. Once, in West Monroe, he was stopped at a stop sign when a gravel truck bumped him from behind. It wasn’t serious and no real damage was done, but it really angered my grandfather to know the driver behind him wasn’t paying attention. So, he exited his truck to give the other driver a piece of his mind.

When he walked back to the driver’s door of the gravel truck, he saw that the driver’s forearm was about the size of my grandfather’s thigh (and my grandfather was no small man). Without missing a beat, my grandfather looked up with those beautiful blue eyes and asked, “Did I hurt you?” The other driver burst into laughter and they became friends on the spot.

He taught my cousins how to shoot craps. Jeanette and Cecil are brother and sister. When they had learned the ropes and paired off to play, Jeanette wanted to play for fun but Cecil insisted they play for real money, so they did. Jeanette had all his money in a matter of minutes and in a rage (they were kids, remember, so tempers flared rather easily; today, Cecil is one of the most generous, most gentle and patient people I know) he physically attacked her. She won that contest, too. But the really funny part was my grandfather sat there and watched as Jeanette twice took Cecil’s measure, never interfering. Only when it was over did he offer words of advice – to Cecil, something about never underestimating your opponent.

Now about that Klan comment that got me in trouble: In 1963, I was home on leave from the Air Force. Certain that the girls would be attracted to my uniform, I wore it when I went into Ruston to visit Stinson’s Music Box, Ruston’s only record store. While I was in there, two men entered whom I knew. I won’t mention their names, but my dad worked for one of them from time to time in his auto repair shop. They saw me in my uniform and asked me to come outside.

When we were out on the sidewalk where no one could hear, they asked me to join the Klan and to recruit fellow members of the military at Keesler AFB in Biloxi where I was stationed. Somewhat unadvisedly and unwisely, I repeated my grandfather’s line: “Any sonofabitch who has to hide under a sheet to do his dirty work ain’t a man – he’s a coward.”

They didn’t take it well and about an hour later, I was forced off the road south of Ruston on U.S. 167. This time there were four of them (I guess just 2-to-1 odds didn’t give them sufficient confidence) and they told me if I ever said something like that again, they’d kill me. That was a pretty stupid thing to do because I knew each one of them. When they left, I took out a pen and piece of paper and wrote the date, time, location, the threat they made and each of their names so that if something violent happened to me, there would at least be a record of their threat. I kept that piece of paper in my wallet until the last one had died.

The point of all this reminiscing and reflection is to say 50 years ago this week (May 20), my grandfather died. My first child wasn’t born until more than a year later, in 1972. I so regret that he missed the births of my three daughters.

He had diabetes and lost a leg to the disease. And while it slowed him down during his last year of life, it never stopped him. I can still see him in his wheelchair, going up and down the rows in his backyard garden, nurturing his watermelons, tomatoes, peas and corn. Watching him struggle alone and determined, politely refusing all offers of help, was something that both hurt deeply and filled me with an overwhelming sense of pride and love.

The day after his funeral, his beloved dog, Duke, disappeared. I guess he missed my grandfather.

After 50 years, I miss him, too, with an emptiness that’s impossible to put into words, but the memory of his sacrifice on my behalf will never fade.

And though I cried, I was so proud

To love a man so rare

–The Captain and the Kid, by Jimmy Buffett