[rollei_list] Re: The Fourth of July
- From: Marc James Small <marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2012 03:23:52 -0400
At 04:43 PM 7/4/2012, Jerry Lehrer wrote:
>Dear Tory,
>
>Thanks for the Revisionist history lesson.;-)
>
>God Bless the USA!
Good Lord, Jerry, don't get me started! My people at the time of the
Revolution lived on the periphery of civilization, the
Appalachians. I could take you to many of these sites, if you
wish. I can show you the foundations of a building built by a
fourth-great-grandfather in 1761, a fellow who went on to have an
honorable role in Pontiac's Rebellion -- Hell, Ward Bond played him
in that 1947 de Mille vehicle, UNCONQUERED, in which the billing is
improper -- it lists the Coop and Goddard as the stars, where, of
course, Ward Bond was the central character. (Want a copy of the
book? Pay the postage, and it's yours.) I was raised with these
stories. My parents never gave me a chance: they had their stories
and then they had their documents to back up the tales, and I am
slowly sending those on to the Archive my son has established in
Wasilla, Alaska. I often meet people who do not know their own
grandparents. Well, I knew my grandparents and two of my
great-grandfathers. I was raised with this family lore a part of
me. I have seen the graves of the Minnears, now swallowed up in the
Horseshoe Bend Dam in West Virginia. A third-great-grandfather had a
shot tower, if you know what that is, and that yet survives. At age
3, I met a cousin whose father had fought in the Civil War, albeit on
the Southron side, one of the very few of my family to have done so
(Samuel Caldwell Bowman), the rest having been hard-core Yankees.
Yes, we were Tories, as I still am. My people were farmers along the
hard line where civilization ended. None of them wished to protest
the rights of the Crown until the Crown insisted on stirring up those
locals and they were forced into a war they did not wish. I had two
great-uncles killed in that, the only combat deaths in my family
other than Culloden, where two of my great-uncles were slaughtered by
the Bloody Campbells.
Aren't you glad you asked?
Marc
It is a good world for doing good deeds.
-- Nathaniel the Faun
---
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