Category Archives: Miscellany

This category contains posts that do not fit anywhere else, or have not yet been assigned to categories.

A Tribute to Uncle Fred Hudson, 1927 -2017

Miscellany

Yesterday, along with cousins and friends, I struggled through rain and mud to serve as a pall bearer for my uncle, Fred Hudson. The husband for 64 years of my Aunt Inez, my father’s oldest sibling, he was actually my uncle by marriage, of course, but you would never have known that; he treated all of us—my brothers, my cousins, and me— like his children. I grew up in Uncle Fred’s shadow. For the first twenty years or so of my life, I could see his house from my own, and he was as much a part of my life as breathing. When my brothers and I were old enough to occasionally stay at home alone, one of our parents’ backup emergency instructions was always, “Call Uncle Fred.” I don’t think we ever did, but we knew from a lifetime of experience that he was the kind of man who could fix problems and make things happen.

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Searching for the Witches’ Sabbath as an Objective Event

Folklore, History, Miscellany

This 2007 paper represents historiographical research done for a graduate history seminar at Murray State University under the supervision of Professor Alice Walters, to whom I am grateful. I am posting it here on American Pathos so I may more easily share it with an interested friend.

One of the most enduring and provocative images of the witch-hunts of the Early Modern Period in Europe is that of the witches’ sabbath. The cartoon witches that were once popular fare in modern entertainment often appeared in groups, and the glamorized (and sometimes eroticized) witch imagery that appears throughout the western world each October portrays the witch as a gregarious creature, meeting with other witches, stirring pots, and flying about. To the people of the witch-hunt era, however, and especially to secular and church officials who sought out and punished suspected witches, the witch sabbaths were deadly serious business.

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On the Death of Noah Chamberlin

Miscellany

I wrote this short essay on the night Noah Chamberlin’s body was found, and published it as a Facebook note. It did not occur to me to put it on my blog, which was new at the time. I republish it here on the anniversary of that sad event. I did not know the child or his family, but was literally en route to aid in the search when news broke that he had been found. –KB

History is filled with stories of ordinary men and women discovering community in the facing-down of tragedy, even when–perhaps especially when–it was clear, or seemed clear, that tragedy would carry the day.

In 1881, when the wounded President James A. Garfield expressed a desire to die amid the gulls and breezes of the New Jersey Shore, rather than in the sweltering confines of his White House sick room, the citizens of Elberon labored through the night to lay a rail spur right to the stricken president’s cottage door. In our own time, unemployed, suffering, and disheartened hard rock miners flocked to Texas, in the face of almost certain failure, and somehow saved the life of Jessica McClure, a small child who had fallen into a well.

No one who followed the Noah Chamberlin story will go to bed happy tonight; a family and a community grieve. And bound up in the tragic death of the child there is another, more subtle, different kind of grief, less acute, but grief all the same: the surrender of the dream of the victory–the letting go of the miracle. The people who pulled Baby Jessica from the well never knew that grief. Her story stands as a monument to the hopes and dreams to which shattered people dare cling.

Miracles are fickle.

Still, we mustn’t despair. Noah was found. In this, his poor family can find the strength to live again, difficult as that may seem tonight. Likewise, the effort to save his life brought out the best in our people: the grit of our frontier and immigrant ancestors; the simple, pragmatic compassion of our rural, agrarian past; and the courage of our martial heritage.

In a world without front porches, quilting bees, or barn raisings, a child wanders away, and suddenly we are all neighbors again.

To find community, people need a port to seek. There is no more effective lighthouse than a child in trouble. One yearns only to have seen the light before it dimmed.

KB

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Todd Anderson Blaeuer: In Memoriam

Memorials, Miscellany, Phi Kappa Tau Fraternity,

I originally wrote this memorial on the night of October 31, 2015, when I learned of the death of my friend, Todd Blaeuer. That was one year ago this week, and I have moved it to American Path[o]s to make it more permanent and more accessible.

As one who talks and writes and, in some sense, “performs” for a living, I am not accustomed to being at a loss for words, as I have been for the last few hours. I feel compelled, on this Halloween night, now that my house is quiet, to change the clocks to standard time and go to bed.

The news of the death of my old friend and fraternity brother, Todd Blaeuer, has made that impossible.

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The Death of George Washington in American Memory and in the Memories of his Successors

Miscellany, Presidential History

On the night of Saturday December 14, 1799, George Washington, 67 years old, died in his bed at Mount Vernon. His death was a family and medical drama, a source of endless controversy, and the opening act in a period of official and unofficial anguish throughout the United States. As the sad tidings spread, the country experienced a sense of collective and national loss never before known and rarely equaled since. The United States government, sitting in Philadelphia, received the news with reluctant incredulity and then began the long process of national mourning under the leadership of its president. Scattered across the country were other men who would one day succeed Washington as chief executive. Some were already national figures, while others remained in obscurity or in childhood, little dreaming that they would someday occupy the presidential office. Those of his successors who wrote in memory of him, as many of them eventually did, would find, in their reflections upon the life and death of Washington, that, for good or ill, their lives had been inextricably linked with his.

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