Oil in the Creek

Everywhere I go and everything I do, I'm thinking about the oil leak in the Gulf. It's always in the corner of the peripheral vision of my mind's eye like a news graphic.

On the way to the library:

At the grocery store:

Eating my favorite foods:

Lately, though, there's a new graphic competing for space in my peripheral worldview:

It gets even worse when I'm walking through Sugar Creek:

Beautiful Sugar Creek, Missouri, is somewhat a BP town. It started out 100+ years ago as a Standard Oil town. Our grandparents and great-grandparents came from the "Old Country" (Czechoslovakia, Croatia, Hungary, etc.) to a land they were told had streets paved with gold, and none that I knew of were disappointed with the reality of the "New World". There was good paying work for the strong Hunkies who made their homes in the town near the bluffs of the Missouri River. They worked hard and many (if not most) used part of their paychecks to invest in the company that was their families' bread and butter.

Many Creekers who didn't work at the refinery were shrewd enough to know a solid company when they saw one, and it's hard to throw a rock in Sugar Creek nowadays without hitting someone who either worked for, saved for, or inherited Standard Oil stock, which later would be called Amoco stock. The refinery closed up shop in the early 1980s, taking almost all the jobs but leaving behind a community liberally dotted with Amoco shareholders, who became BP shareholders when Amoco was bought by British Petroleum in the 1990s. The Standard/Amoco/BP stock and its quarterly dividends have been the economic mainstay for many a senior citizen who worked hard during the town's heyday (when the refinery belched fumes that made the whole town smell like rotten eggs but nobody went hungry or shoe-less like they did in the Old Country), and the stock has provided financial security for families who lost loved ones to cancer caused by the benzines that, like the stock, the refinery left behind. Sugar Creek, Missouri, by-product of the American Dream, God bless it. Neither war nor Depression nor loss of the refinery has diminished this town's spirit

But can any of us survive this???

Live TV : Ustream

Go to Father

An obscure old poem that I stumbled upon:

"Go to Father!" she said
When I asked her to wed,
And she knew that I knew
That her father was dead,
And she knew that I knew
What a life he had led,
So she knew that I knew
What she meant when she said,
"Go to Father!"

Amateur Forestry

I got this bud from a guy I met who's from Humboldt County, California

It's not what you (might) think. It came from a sequoia tree, the tallest tree in the world. That's right, I'm going to grow my very own Redwood Forest right here in the Heart of America.

(Coming Soon)

The seeds are happily germinating (I hope) in a Ziploc® bag between two wet paper towels.

It will nicely complement my future lemon tree grove

Fourteen years and three months from now I'm going to have the freshest lemonade in all of Kansas City!

Now if I can just figure out how to germinate a coconut... or where to find the seeds in a pineapple... Google will be there for me when I'm ready. Professor Ulichne assures me that at some point in the distant future, Kansas City will be beach-front property. This is one the ways I'm preparing for that.

Something Cool

Though I'm not much of a food blogger, I can't help but share my enthusiasm for my new favorite snack. Duros, duritos, doritas, I've seen them called several different things. They look like small, orange, wagon-wheel shaped pastas, but they're not pasta at all, in the traditional sense. On the left is what they look like when you buy them, and on the right what they look like after about 35 seconds in the microwave.

I've heard the same effect can be achieved by deep-frying them, but why add the extra calories and fat when they are seemingly non-caloric as is?

They are crispy and as light as air, yet they're stout and hold up against any kind of salsa or dip, pico de gallo, etc., and I find they are at their best alongside a bowl of guacamole. Eaten alone they are relatively bland, kind of like a Cheeto without the cheese, or more like a Funyun without the "unyun", though I've grown fond of eating them by themselves. In fact, I was on a pretty steady diet of duritos and little else for the week and a half or so that the 2-lb bag I bought for $1.99 lasted.

I got my duritos at a little Dominican grocery store just west of Chrysler on 23rd Street in Independence, Mo., but you can probably find them at your favorite local Latino grocer, or you could pay more and get a lot less at Amazon.com.

KC Black History Month Notes

Lewis Woods was a Kansas City businessman. In his time he was best known as the publisher of The Rising Son, a weekly newspaper for the region's African American population.

This is what the Rising Son looked like:

In 1903 the editor of the Rising Son was Harry R. Graham.

In a newspaper 'Salutory' he spelled out the mission statement of the Rising Son. He said, in part,

"As to newspaper work our early experiences, dating from the year of 1876, enable us to fully comprehend the arduous and responsible duties of editor, and the great field for the enlightenment and elevation of our race which is open and needs the services of fearless advocates and defenders. We come to assist, and not to antagonize, all other agencies to build up the race morally, socially, intellectually and politically."

There was a lot of talk in the Rising Son about elevation of the race, and for good reason. In the early Twentieth Century African Americans were becoming educated at colleges like Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City; they were becoming doctors and lawyers, and yet their children couldn't get medicine from the dispensary at Mercy Hospital. If they needed surgery they had to go to Kansas City, Kansas to get it. The schools were segregated, and the Rising Son often lamented that the city's "colored schools" were at the bottom of the school district funding barrel. African Americans were restricted as to where they could live, sometimes violently.

Forty years after the Emancipation Proclamation gave slaves their freedom, there were some (but not all) white people who absolutely refused to accept the idea of racial equality. One of these was Confederate Colonel John T. Crisp, a Jackson County politician whose career went as far as the Missouri Legislature.

His mission in 1903 was championing a bill keeping African Americans off of railroad cars that white people would be riding on. The Rising Son did not take kindly to Colonel Crisps ideas. They rallied protest through their paper. Among the editorials on the issue they stated:

"...The men of Crisp's calibre can give no plausible cause or demand for such a law. It is only the hateful animosity ranking in the hearts of a few men like the author of the bill that have a desire to crush the Colored man; to impose upon his manhood and to curtail the few public accommodations he has. The broad-minded white man is perfectly willing that we be left to the enjoyment of a few of the civil and personal rights left us in Missouri. The Democratic legislature cannot afford to pass the Jim Crow law."

The "Jim Crow Car" bill made it out of committee in the Democratic-led Missouri House on February 17 of that year (this was back when the Democrats were outspoken racists and the party of Lincoln was considered "the friend of the Negro"). Among the kinder things that Colonel Crisp said that day was this statement to Republicans:

"What would the Republicans do for the blacks -- amalgamate them, make them a race of mulattoes? I do not know why it is, but one drop of black blood in a hundred gallons of white blood contaminates it. It is God's way."

When put to a vote by the house, though, the Jim Crow Car bill went down by a vote of 55 for to 75 against on March 11. The Republican floor leader, O'Fallon of Holt county, reminded the legislature that the parties of African royalty coming to next year's Worlds Fair would be treated with courtesy until they got to Missouri's border. He summed up his party's sentiments by saying that white people kept the Negro in slavery for 250 years. Now that they are free, the Negroes ought not to be discouraged in their efforts to become good citizens. "I look upon this," he said, "as freak legislation. We ought not to put these people down when we could help them and should, in justice, and in expatiation of the crime of slavery, give them all the help we can." The Kansas City Times credited the bill's loss to the fact that Democrats from big cities did not want to anger their black constituents, who had been voting in large numbers in Missouri since 1869.

Colonel Crisp died the month after the Jim Crow Car bill was killed. About his death, the Rising Son said this:

"Col. John T. Crisp of Jackson County, sah, is gone. With charity for all and malice for none, we hope he is at rest. One thing we know there will be no vaporings from him on these mundane shores, and as far as he is concerned, Jim Crow cars and Negrophobia will have a little rest. Let us look over the past and forget John T. Crisp, of Jackson County, suh!"

But the Jim Crow Car bill would come back again and again, and the struggle would be long, and the bigotry of yesteryear lives on in too many hearts today. And although there are few people around this area that can tell you a single thing about Colonel Crisp, he got the legacy of both a street and a lake named after him in Independence, while men like Lewis Woods and Harry R. Graham live on only in microfilm obscurity and the occasional footnote reference. Crisp would not be the only one to be honored for a career furthered by racial hatred. Someday I'll write about James A. Reed.