Most of my numerous Aug. 2020 posts relate to politics.  Aug 17-20 posts related to the DNC Convention; Aug 24-28 to the Trump Convention.  At Aug 1 and 2 I defined Democrats and “T’s” as I saw them.

This is my endorsement of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  I filed a post note on Aug. 21:

POSTNOTE Aug. 21: Pedestrian though they are, I do think about what I’m going to say in these posts, and about the headline that precedes them.

So it was with this one, which initially I was going to title “Tone” or something similar.  In fact, I had a draft so titled.

Tone has a number of definitions.  Here is one from on-line search engine: “2. the general character or attitude of a place, piece of writing, situation, etc. “my friend and I lowered the tone with our oafish ways”

The definition included 19 synonyms, as “feel”, “attitude”, etc.

I’ll say little more.  We Americans are very sloppy about care of our precious democracy.  Sometimes our carelessness and selfishness catches up with us.  We need a positive tone in these difficult times.  Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris provide the positive we so desperately need at this time in out history.

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“Give people light and they will find the way.”  Joe Biden accepting the nomination for President 8/20/20.  Quote from Ella Baker.

This post is published after Joe Biden’s acceptance speech on Aug. 20.  The contents were composed in draft earlier.  A series similar to my coverage of the Dem Convention will be published during the days of the “T” Convention next week.  

I have always had positive feelings about Joe Biden, and the tone, the feeling, of the Democratic Convention just completed was very positive, and the quotation he used most appropriate.

Some time ago, I checked my photo file, and I found three occasions on which I took photos , in person, of Joe Biden: Oct. 5, 2010. and Aug. 21, 2012; and Jan. 10, 2017, when the Biden’s and Obama’s bade farewell from eight years as President and Vice-President in Chicago.  Here are my snapshots.  The above is the first photo I have kept of Kamala Harris.

Joe Biden, Oct 5, 2010, St. Paul MN. Each photo Dick Bernard

Joe Biden Aug. 21, 2012, Minneapolis Mn

There are many biographies of Joe Biden: here’s one which seems neutral and sufficiently detailed.

I strongly support the Biden and Harris candidacy.

I relate to Joe Biden.  At the macro level, he has an immense amount of relevant experience for the job he is seeking.  Virtually his entire adult career – he is two years younger than I am – he has been an elected representative: local County Council, United States Senate (36 years), Vice-President of the United States (8 years).    In such positions, there are endless difficult decisions, all of which can be considered right…or wrong…depending on one’s point of view.

Even more so I relate to Joe on the micro – the personal – level.  He has seen and experienced the huge difficulties of living a normal life, beginning at a young age.  He is a common man, with exceptional spirit.

Recently I saw Doris Kearns Goodwin being interviewed on her 2018 book, “Leadership in Turbulent Times“, which profiled four Presidents serving in turbulent times: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

She identifies six traits crucial to a leader especially in difficult times.  Here they are: Empathy, Resilience, Communication, Openness, Impulse Control and Relaxation.

I think Joe Biden has all of these traits, and has exhibited them throughout his long public life.

Has he made mistakes?  Of course.  We all do.  Joe Biden is the person for President in this most crucial time in our nations history.

Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris August 12, 2020

Of course, I “know” Joe Biden far better than Kamala Harris.

When the infrequent person asked “who would you pick for Vice-President” I said, up to the end, that all of Biden’s possibilities were strong candidates.  Earlier, I’ve always had positive feelings about my home-state Senator, Amy Klobuchar, serious competitor for the position Joe Biden now holds, who I’d watched since she first announced as candidate for U.S. Senate in 2006.  Ultimately she withdrew from the Presidential race this year, endorsed Joe, as did Kamala, then withdrew from consideration for V.P., and here we are.

I saw a good objective opinion about Kamala Harris a few days ago in The Washington Post by someone who knows politics and California.  Take the time….

Vice-President is a position of consequence, particularly in this modern era full of complexity.  Experience matters.

There have been fourteen Presidents in my lifetime, 7 Republican, 7 Democrat.  Among them, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson became President after FDR and John Kennedy died in office (1945 and 1963, age 63 and 46).  Gerald Ford, came to be Vice-President when Spiro Agnew resigned; then became President after Richard Nixon resigned as well.  Jimmy Carter made his Vice-President, Walter Mondale, the first Veep with lots of on-the-job responsibilities.

Old age was not a factor in any of the successions.  Sure, it could be, and at some point can be.

Vice-President is a position of consequence.

I am delighted that Kamala Harris has been chosen as the nominee.  She isn’t the first woman running for the position: that would have been Geraldine Ferraro in 1984.  In only a few months we will learn the outcome.

Vote, and vote well-informed, for every candidate in your election, local, state and national.  YOU are the one who makes the difference.

Obama”s and Bidens, Chicago Jan 10, 2017

POSTNOTE 2 Just Above Sunset,Aug. 22: “Out of the darkness”; Washington Post Editorial August 20

COMMENTS (more from on-line at end of this post):

from Bob:  A good blog about Joe Biden and Sen. Harris.  I agree that he was our best choice to lead the country after the disastrous Trump years. And Sen. Harris is a great VP choice.  I saw Biden here in person November 1, 2018, as he and Senator Conrad led a  rally for Heidi Heitkamp during her last senatorial campaign, when she unfortunately lost to  the worthless Cramer who can’t think for himself and worships Trump.

I’m a creature of habit, one aspect of which is “early to bed, early to rise….” which makes watching a Convention at bed-time is a non-starter.  By 9:30 CDT last night I was asleep, as usual.  But I was impressed with the start.

And my favorite blogger, Just Above Sunset, seems to keep a schedule opposite to mine.  So his summary overnight, “Selling Democracy”, is my substitute (always with his permission).  His summaries are always long, so that doesn’t help with people who prefer twitter, but on we go.  We are a nation full of individuals, trying somehow to save a huge country from destroying itself from within.

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Distance Learning:

The Conventions this year are virtual, as are many of the meetings we attend, and church services, etc.  We’re in a new world.

Yesterday on my walk I got to thinking about my first brush with network, other than TV or radio.

It was, I think, the summer of 1984, in Tower, Minnesota.  I represented teachers on Minnesota’s Iron Range, and that summer I stopped in to meet Supt. Pete Jurkovich.

This particular day, there were a number of boxes of then-primitive receivers – I can’t tell you if they were Apple, or Microsoft, or something else…but what I can say I is that the Superintendent was part of a group that was promoting distance learning for small schools that were too small to have, for instance, any foreign language instruction.

So the initiative of these indomitable folks was to establish a fiber optic network so that, for instance, a teacher of French at Virginia Community College, could teach via TV students in Tower-Soudan or other places.  The teacher had a TV studio in place, and the lesson was transmitted by cable.

Some years later I saw a cartoon that illustrated the concep: Distance Learning (click to enlarge).  Not long ago I saw a vintage 1984 computer that was like the devices I saw in the Superintendents office that day:

1984 Apple Macintosh seen Dec. 2019

Supt Jurkovich was part of a network of school officials who were espousing this technology, which was a hard sell in those days before the internet became ubiquitous.

I followed it, but only a little, so I’m not even sure of what the movement was called, or if a history of it exists.  Perhaps someone can enlighten me.

I don’t recall ever seeing it actually in operation, though I know it existed.

Whatever the case, what those folks were working on years ago, is now old hat.  And life will never be the same again.

COMMENTS:

Dick: I asked a person I know, Mary, who is a long-time seasonal resident in the Tower-Soudan area to look at this post: “…at least take a look.  Maybe you can enlighten me a little more.  What I relate about T-S is true – an actual experience, really pretty vivid.  I don’t know if there is still a school in T-S.  The Superintendents office, as I recall it, was a vacant classroom.”  

Mary responded: Your request hit a very raw local nerve.
There is no longer a school in Tower-Soudan (except for a small charter secondary created after the big scandal.)
The issue of using school funds to promote a ‘yes’ vote on a referendum to close, consolidate, build several new schools, etc, was eventually before the State Supreme Court. The ruling was in favor of the plaintiffs who objected to the changes, but it was too late to stop it. The voters were told the changes would save money and that has NOT been the case. Several gracious older school buildings now sit empty and the children have long bus rides.
Makes me angry every time I drive by the building that was the Cook school.
All of this deception was the recommendation of a sleazy consulting firm named Johnson Controls. Local voters paid a large fee to be ill-advised and misled.

Dick, in response (I was teacher union staff in the area from 1983-91; I left before the controversy described above): I didn’t mean to hit a hornets nest!
When I was staff up there Tower-Soudan was its own school district; then there was the immense (geographically) St. Louis County (Cook, Orr, Cherry, Forbes, Alango, Brookston, Toivola-Meadowlands and possibly more), then Nett Lake, Virginia, Hibbing, Grand Rapids, Eveleth, Gilbert, Ely, Babbitt and several more iron range school districts.  I know this has all changed, but it has been many years since I’ve been up there.  Pete Jurkovich comes up in google in a court case unrelated to school consolidation.  Apparently his Dad was a teacher in Aurora-Hoyt Lakes – I saw an obituary.  Pete had progressive ideas with the distance learning, apparently.  Distance learning was a real rare novelty then; today with Covid-19, virtual is about all we can count on.

A good friend who is Iranian offers an on-line movie tip for this week Wednesday: “Thought you may be interested in this history film about Iran. It is eye opening.”  Details are here.  I am a member of the sponsoring organization MSP Film Society which has a long-standing reputation for excellence in this area.   Like everyone else, Covid-19 has caused the film society to change its method of delivery of film.

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*”The West” has a long and rarely stellar history in the region called generically “The Middle East”.  Our news releases hardly match our performance, especially since WWI and the petroleum era.

A few days ago an agreement which the President described as “huge” was reached between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.  The agreement and the process is described by columnist David Ignatius in The Washington Post on August 13.  You can read the analysis here.  Ignatius is a respected commentator on such matters.

I will be watching how the current President will posture about this agreement which, as Ignatius says, “was the culmination of years of secret contacts“.  DT’s tendency is to begin history with his administration.  Everything done before was, or today is, a failure, to be discarded, especially if a Democrat had anything to do with it..

Diplomacy of any kind is very hard work and it takes years, and even generations, to achieve results which are, even then, tenuous.  Ask anyone who has ever had to negotiate any kind of change in relationship, from the simplest of marriage counseling, to labor-management relationships and on and on.  Nothing is easy.  The larger the scale, the more complicated.

This is especially true in the Middle East which has an extremely tortured history hardly helped by the U.S. and other parties with an interest in especially petroleum, and whose artificial boundaries were largely and simply the result of dividing the spoils of WWI.

Ignatius has a sentence summarizing the history of the negotiations which helped lead to this weeks agreement.  It is very simple: “The UAE joins Jordan, which reached a peace agreement with Israel in 1994 and Egypt, which signed a pact with its former enemy in 1979.”

The 1979 and 1994 agreements were aided by the very active work of the Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton administrations, and it will be interesting (and unlikely) if the current President will suggest any past assistance from others, particularly Democrats, in providing building blocks towards the new pact.

Diplomacy is a team sport, not an endeavor which will succeed if one administration erases what a previous administration has accomplished.  That’s why I’ll be interested in what the current president has to say as he runs a victory lap.

There are a couple of notes at the end of this post.  As I write, the media is reporting that Joe Biden has chosen a running mate, not yet announced.  As I’ve previously noted, I will write about the Democratic presidential nominee and running mate after the Democratic Convention decides on the nominee a few days from now.

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Last night we had a family Zoom meeting – there have been several, and as we get accustomed to the process they become valued, I think, by all of us.  Last night there were 9 of us on the call, from San Diego to Rochester NY and places in between.

Of course, the pandemic came up, and testing.

One call member has two elementary school age youngsters; one who could not make the call is a Middle School Principal in a large suburban school.

I’ve posted once about the upcoming school year, and will let that suffice from my perspective.  Here it is.  I would encourage reading Marion Brady’s idea for the new year.  We all have ideas; Marion has a long history of serious thinking about public education.  I am his junior by quite a number of years.  A great friend for long term.  He is one of many gifts I’ve received.

Among many critical issues in this country, the issue of what to do about “school” is currently a central issue everywhere.  Who will do what?  In Minnesota, school normally opens the day after Labor Day, which would be Sep 8; some districts opt differently.  I can’t even tell you definitively what will happen in my own school district – my daughters school is 4 miles away, but she has a great planty on her plate for me to bother her with pointless questions.

Somebody on the call wondered why the teachers union position wss – a logical question to a person like myself whose career was teacher union work.  Best I could muster is that I am sure there are lots of discussions about this issue among all parties.  Almost certainly there are school staff who will resign rather than face the increased risk; and hiring replacement staff will not be easy.  Who would want to be a school bus driver in the current environment!

Let’s leave it a that for the moment.  Look up your own school district if interested in the local perspective.

I certainly wish everyone the very best.

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Today is Primary Election Day in Minnesota.  I’ve voted by mail. I decided to take a trip down to south Minneapolis, where the destruction took place in the wake of the George Floyd murder on Memorial Day.

At the corner of Lake (30th) and Chicago, a young person was holding a simple hand-made sign, waving it enthusiastically: “Vote today”

At the site of Floyd’s death, 38th and Chicago, the intersection is still blocked to thru traffic.  There has been news in the paper that the intersection will be reopened, but this is a very delicate issue.  Alternative routes are easy available to everyone.

At the site of “my” restaurant, Gandhi Mahal, the rubble is organized but has not yet been removed.  I saw one sign at the site, which was intriguing:

Site of Gandhi Mahal restaurant in Minneapolis Aug. 11, 2020

A quick search didn’t come up with a clear identity of whomever put up the intriguing sign, painted on fabric inside a circle.  Clues anyone?  I interpret the sign at the place in the most positive and constructive way.

My friend, Jermitt, across the way in Wisconsin, has been sending rich memories of teacher organizing days in Wisconsin.  These are, literally, a book of many chapters, a great addition to history in Wisconsin.

A recent recollection, about Jermitt’s reunion with someone named Henry, got me to thinking back to my own old days in North Dakota…and my first trip through Wisconsin.

First, here’s the one page recollection by Jermitt of his reunion: Jermitt’s Reunion with Henry (click to enlarge image).  You won’t regret the diversion, I assure you.

I was “all country” in growing up years, and in 1955 and 1956 we made two most unusual (for us) trips from rural Mooreton ND (20 miles west of Wahpeton-Breckinridge) to Chicago.  Both trips were to visit Mom’s brother.   The first visit was right after Art and Eileen moved to suburban Chicago, the next, the following year, after their first child, John, was born.   The first year I was 15, the second 16.  This meant that on one of the trips I likely took the wheel once or twice on this great adventure; what an adventure for a kid!  Seven of us in the 1951 Plymouth Suburban.

Freeways were still in the future in the mid-1950s.  You didn’t go around towns; you usually went through them.  our most probable route through Wisconsin was U.S. 12, hi-lited on this map, borrowed from my 1961 Life Pictorial Atlas of the World.  Earlier, in Minnesota, our likely route was U.S. 52 from Fergus Falls to the north Twin Cities with a ‘pit stop’ near Anoka.

Here is the same map in pdf: Wisconsin 196120200801.

Being 15 and 16 years old, I wasn’t taking detailed notes on things like route, etc.  There is a family photo, apparently with me as the photographer, at the Rum River Park at Anoka MN, in suburban Minneapolis (below).  That would have been along Hwy 10.  I know, also, that one of the two years we stayed overnight with relatives in Rockford Il, south of Beloit.

In beween, I have two dominant memories: first, the long hills carrying busy highway 12 and its traffic, which were the pits if you got stuck behind a truck – not infrequent on the two-lane highway.  The second was the stop where my folks bought some absolutely wonderful Colby cheese, the  best I’ve ever had, a memory that will endure forever.  I wish I could remember the town.  I know it was small.

But I digress from Jermitt’s memory, which brought forth my own.

My Uncle and Aunt, newly married, had just moved to Chicago.  He began a career as a sales engineer for General Electric.  Both times we came to visit there we were able to take in a Major League Baseball game – something none of us had ever seen – this was pre-television in our family.  Both times, the White Sox were not in town, but the Chicago Cubs were at Wrigley Field.  So Uncle Art took at least myself and my Dad to see the Cubs.  We were down the right field line probably in corporate seats.  Both were quite the events for us.  Beautiful sunshiny days.

One of the years the opponent was the Pittsburgh Pirates, the other, the New York Giants.  In both years, I think both competitors were 7th and 8th (last) in the standings in the National League.  That made no difference to us.

I don’t recall who won or lost the two games.  It makes no difference.  It wasn’t until years later that I learned that hall-of-famer Ernie Banks was early in his career with the Cubs, and another hall-of-famer Willie Mays played for the New York Giants!  Both likely played as we watched.  Jermitt recalls another hall-of-famer – you have to read his writeup!

As one gets elder, thoughts more and more turn back to the good old days, which weren’t always so good, as we all know.  But along the ways there are memories that we treasure.  Enjoy them.

The Bernard family at Anoka MN, summer 1956. Photo by Dick Bernard

POSTNOTE: Memories

Aging brings memories…things that just stick in our brains, some whether we want them there or not!  It just is.

Jermitt’s memory of a meetup with a famous man before he became famous excited my own much more pedestrian memory, the two auto trips into Wisconsin in 1955 and 1956 (disclosure, today I live 10 miles from Wisconsin.  The people over there seem pretty much okay!)  65 years ago Wisconsin, and the ultimate destination Chicago, were hundreds of miles beyond the country road our 1951 Plymouth travelled to get to Minnesota, first, then the big cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, then the far bigger big city of Chicago-land (actually, Broadview, where Uncle Art and Aunt Eileen first set roots.).

It has been an interesting trip down memory lane – all I remember is what is written above.

I’m a geography major, and I’ve always like maps, and kept many of them.

Our trip pre-dated the Interstate Highway system, credited to Dwight Eisenhower, ironically enabled by a Law passed in 1956, the year of our second trip east.   I first drove on brand-new I-94 between Jamestown and Valley City ND when I started college in 1958.  When I moved to the Minneapolis area in 1965, they were just clearing ground for I-35W going south from downtown.

Of course, at the time of our trip my short-term memory was consumed by not always cordial thoughts about pesky siblings, all younger than this 15 year old.  Oh, for “social distancing”, then!

I got to wondering what might have been our route in Minnesota and yesterday dug out one of the oldest road maps I have, from sometime in the 1950s of Minnesota.  Indeed, it perhaps was THE map for the trip described.  Below is the cover, Minneapolis St. Paul in pdf here: Stamdard Oil Map 1950s20200804

1950s Standard Oil Road Map, Minnesota

The old map reveals that Highways 10 and 52 joined about St. Cloud area, then diverted again, with highway 10 going into downtown St. Paul and thence on into Wisconsin as well.  I’m quite certain that highway 12 was then our route – it seems to have been the main connection.  .

The rest of the story is up to the readers imagination.  What are your stories?

Thanks, Jermitt.