It's an interesting document, with lots of articles directly on-topic, an excerpt from Tim O'Brien's novel The Things They Carried, and some articles less directly about the memorial.

One of the articles is by Lynda Van Devanter, who was a nurse at the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku; these photographs, both of which were taken at the 71st, are among the illustrations. (This article, too, is a book excerpt, from Home Before Morning.)

My office phone rang. Since it was an external call, and I didn't recognize the number, odds were it was either a vendor or a wrong number. Nope; Lauren Morgan introduced herself as an editor with Boston Publishing, and she was working with Vietnam Veterans of America on a magazine issue. They'd found a couple of my pictures on Flickr, and wanted to use them to illustrate an article. I asked which photos they were planning to use, which she described, and I said sure. We talked about some details for a few minutes, and the conversation ended.

She called again last week, asking where to mail the complimentary copies. Those showed up yesterday. They're really quite beautiful; much higher quality than I anticipated. I do find it odd that she contacted me at work; while I've always known it was possible (I've had the same work phone number for 20 years, and it's available on the web), I'm reasonably certain it's easier to find my home number, which is where I usually field out-of-the-blue calls.

I bought my copy of The Things They Carried shortly after the book was first published, and heard Tim talk about the book this summer at Macalester's reunion. Delighted to share a magazine with him; certainly never expected it to happen. Haven't read Home Before Morning, but I've just added it to my Amazon wishlist.

I attended the Class of 1982's twenty-fifth anniversary reunion at Macalester College in June, and have been digesting the experience ever since. Some thoughts....

Many people find value in a reunion's networking: Reconnecting with old friends, retelling old tales, and spinning new tales about the shared trip to middle age. I'm not one of those folks. My reunion was more about memory, about exploring a familiar neighborhood, about revisiting a place that still gives my life a foundation.

My networking efforts failed, anyway. Of eighty or so classmates who attended the reunion, only two clearly remembered me. My odd academic history made for some discomfort, as many conversations necessarily began with a discussion of why I didn't seem familiar. My response involved enrolling at Mac in 1967, dropping out as a sophomore, a Vietnam year, classes at another institution, a decade spent mostly working in politics, and returning to complete my degree. My January graduation further confounds things.

Our Class Reunion theme was "Get Over It." This theme implies an unasked question: Was (is) the Macalester experience worth the price? The question came up by implication in those conversations with imperfectly-remembered classmates, by reference in a presentation exploring our responses to a reunion survey, and quite explicitly twice at the Class Dinner: Our hostess (Mary Morse Marti, I think) wandered around the topic for several minutes before explicitly raising the question as something she still found difficult to answer, and Macalester's President Brian Rosenberg told us he considers all the early-eighties classes to be problems because their members have largely detached themselves from the community. These concerns have causes.

My classmates experienced the tail-end of the school's budget crisis, and it's quite possible to portray their college years harshly. They (we) remember the classrooms and dorms at their worst--old buildings, in many cases, whose maintenance had been deferred, then deferred again, as the college stumbled through the seventies. They attended a school whose glory years--the sixties--seemed impossible to recover in a very different political and economic climate, and whose present was dominated by fiscal concerns. Entire departments were, in the memories of my classmates, academically inadequate; students who concentrated in those disciplines feel particularly aggrieved about their Macalester experience. And, of course, my class directly remembers the football losing streak, which ended during "our" junior year (quotes because I wasn't actually there).

For many of my classmates, then, their college career is a bitter-sweet memory. It strained the family budget, and left them personally in heavy debt, without delivering the satisfactions they'd thought--and still think--they should get from a liberal arts education. Their dissatisfaction is grounded in reality, and their questions about value are reasonable. Perhaps it really was an exercise in futility.

A final annoyance: After we graduated, the school's finances recovered. While no one begrudges our successors their good fortune, it gives us yet another unsatisfactory comparison. It's really quite sane to believe the early-80s classes at Mac drew a bad hand.

While I think this is a fair summary of the sentiments I heard at the reunion, it's certainly as distorted a portrait of Macalester as the Oversimplified History I sketched a few days ago. I'll talk about why in the next installment.

I returned to Macalester College as a 31-year-old senior in January of 1981. One reason for the mid-winter start was Mac's January term, which would let me get my feet wet in a differently-demanding fashion than a fall start would have entailed. I signed up for Jim Stewart's one-off course titled 1877; the course description amounted to "1877 was an interesting year. We'll read newspapers from the time on microfilm, and will make presentations about what we learn."

For some reason the 1877 microfilm wasn't available, so Jim fell back to a set of early 1869 newspaper films Ernie Sandeen had acquired for some other project. This changed the focus just a bit, but the main class objective was unchanged: We were learning a particular set of research tools, and practices. We were set to exploring for the first week; the class sessions began with observations about the mechanics of reading microfilm, then moved to discussions of such things as evolving newspaper layout, editorial emphases, and advertising practices. For the second week, Jim assigned us stories to track down without consulting modern sources; we talked in class about how the story-as-reported differed from the story as we recalled it from history textbooks, and what those differences might mean.

The third and fourth weeks were self-assigned projects. My third week project was about newspaper organization; specifically, I compared the layout of the Detroit Free Press as of 1869 with three other papers, and speculated a bit about why they differed. My final week's project was about Railroad Fever.

The entire nation had the Railroad Fever in 1869. Most newspapers in the collection routinely included notes and articles under that rubric, clearly because everyone recognized the symptoms. Michigan was nursing two outbreaks: Promoters were raising money to build a more direct line (an "air line") between Detroit and Chicago which would roughly follow the route of the Chicago Road, and actual construction was occurring for a line connecting Jackson and Grand Rapids. Both remain interesting, for different reasons.

The Air-Line promoters touted their project as a competitor to the Michigan Central line which already connected the terminal cities; MC was widely seen as a monopolist and therefore widely despised. When the microfilm ran out, the project was unsettled--but the fund-raising effort worked. Jackson and Niles were connected by rail in 1871, and an existing line was purchased to complete the Chicago connection. Worth noting: The promoters promptly leased the new line to the Central; indeed, it seems quite likely that they were Michigan Central agents from the start. (I've left out a lot of detail; see Wikipedia's account of the railroad for those.) I gather this rail has been pulled up, but that's a relatively recent occurrence; it still had regular traffic a couple decades ago.

The 1869 news about the Grand River Valley Railroad was always about celebrations. The line reached Morgan, on Thornapple Lake, early in January; by the time our newspapers ran out there were parades and parties in Hastings. GVRR was already a Central captive, but these towns were pleased just to find themselves on the map. It may be that they later learned to hate the monster.

The Valley branch remained in use under the Michigan Central/New York Central/Penn Central/Conrail succession into the 1970s, with CR ceding the line to the State of Michigan in 1979. The State leased the line to the Kent, Barry, and Eaton Connecting Railway until that road failed in 1983, at which time the line was abandoned. The track would soon be pulled up, but obvious remnants of the right of way were left along the entire route. Those remnants are the basis of the Paul Henry-Thornapple Trail.

Which takes me back to Andy's color tour. Life is often circular, as are my tales.

It's also nearly six decades old. A piece of furniture gets pretty battered if you use it every day for 57 years. Even if it cost a fortune, and even if it's made of oak.

Mom passed away a couple years ago, and basically left everything to everyone. The desk was one of the easy pieces to settle: Debbie wanted to preserve it, while Richard and I had/have no interest in it whatever. We both recognize the quality, but it won't fit well in our offices, it needs to be refinished, and the emotional connection's pretty weak. Debbie's office needs are different (she's a preacher-in-training), and she's clearly more attached to the desk than we are. That's fine.

All this came up last weekend as Joan and I were helping Debbie move. Debbie still can't believe I don't want the desk....

We Signal folks frequented three NCO clubs while I was in Pleiku. The club in 71st Evac had decent food, occasional entertainment, and friends, but was too big and too ugly to spend an evening unless you were mainly planning to drink. Club 21 in the local MACV compound had a nightclub atmosphere and was more likely to have live entertainment; that's where I usually ate supper after the end-of-workday traffic rush ended. And the club at the Air Base I remember as a neighborhood bar, and as the only club open in the morning when our night shift ended. Sometimes that was valuable.

One morning, after thirteen hours at the DSTE and on the teletypes, we hit the airbase bar for breakfast and a few drinks, only to discover that the club was planning to run the (then) new Ned Kelly movie. So we stayed and watched, as did a handful of Aussies who were stationed in the vicinity.

Mick Jagger or no, the movie was boring, and would have been dull even had we understood the story. Interesting, in its way, but very slow. We got loud, the Aussies took offense, we went home to bed.

Thought about calling this entry "You're better off dead" (makes sense if you know the song). But I figured it wasn't a good idea.

Joan and I heard Garnet when he was in town last year; that was a powerful evening built on what I took to be a version of his standard performance set. Tonight's show, before a substantially smaller audience, was quite different; perhaps more relaxed, differently introspective, with fewer tales. Garnet's a droll story-teller, a strong and exceptional singer, a very good writer--and an formidible guitarist. He played six or eight guitars over the course of the concert; each instrument change had musical justification, rewarded different technical skills, and improved the song.

His most familiar song, Small Victory, tells about rescuing a horse whose racing career had ended well past her prime years. A new life is one victory for this pony; another victory follows as she gives birth to a foal. Garnet's always been playful with this song's rhythm, aware of the beat but not tightly bound to it. It's particularly fascinating that his voice plays the beat differently from his fingers. A technically sweet performance, both vocally and on guitar, which ornaments and enhances the song's message.

Night Drive is something else entirely. Although this song also has a lyric and a story, the guitar dominates the composition. It's an electric piece, with the rhythm and melody built on echo and harmonics as much as on Garnet's formidable picking and fingering skills. (There's an excerpt available on Garnet's site.) It starts quietly, builds a highway pulse (Night Drive indeed), and grows louder, more complex, and more interesting for ten minutes or so. The vocal portion of the song ended with a quotation from brother Stan's Northwest Passage which is not on the recorded version but certainly enhances the performance; that's perhaps the song's climax, but the guitar continues into the night for some time. By song's end the room was reverberating, Garnet was exhausted, and the crowd was exhilarated.

Then home, through the still-falling snow.

Demographics: Tonight's audience looked a lot like me--most of us appeared to be in our fifties and had probably first encountered Garnet when he was accompanying Stan in the 1970s. I'm not sure the audience makeup bodes well for singer-songwriters, but perhaps it's a Lansing-area thing.

The bike in question was a Schwinn Varsity. Dad had purchased it for me in 1968, for my use as transportation around St. Paul during my sophomore year at Macalester. The bike had served me well over the years, but had deteriorated to the point I couldn't ride it any more.

The first task was simple repair. Didn't know anything about maintaining bikes, then, so I hied off to the bookstore and collected a couple bicycle repair manuals. With their assistance I was able to get the bike apart, cleaned, lubed (with STP!), reassembled, and back on the road. It was immediately clear that the rear derailleur--a (Schwinn Approved) Huret Alvit--was past any hope of repair, and the rear wheel was similarly hopeless. Not knowing what it would cost to replace these parts, I started calling bicycle shops and describing my problem.

By far the most helpful responses came from Bernie (Baisch) Stevenson, one of the owners at Alfred E. Bike, who seconded one of my books' recommendation that SunTour made the best shifters, reassured me that the changer would work on my bike, and quoted me a far better price than any other shop. So I found my way to the shop and spent most of the 40 bucks, came back, and had things working when Mom got back to Kalamazoo.

For the next couple years, the Varsity became my main transportation. I was working on political campaigns for most of '74; in '75 I became active in the Kalamazoo Bicycle Club--succeeding to President when John Busack graduated from college and moved away. Another time's story....

Late in 1975 this bike was stolen, and the new Assenmacher replaced it as my main transportation. Can't say I missed the old bike, but it was a trusty and reliable old friend for many years.

I don't think I knew Brian Dana Akers in the 1970s, but since I was working closely with his brother and knew his parents socially it's pretty likely I met him once or twice. Anyway, he's grown up to write science fiction and has a lengthy online autobiography on his personal website. About a quarter of the way down the page is a word portrait of his father, Owen, which includes Action Now in a long list of organizations Owen participated in. Brian's father was as remarkable as the portrait suggests. What I think the portrait misses is that Owen's heavy workload was fairly seamless; I had contacts with him in several of his roles and he was always the same person, working on the same causes, and finding reinforcement from his friends and colleagues as he moved from meeting to meeting. A strenuous life, yes, and not everyone loved Owen Akers, but many did.

Brian's summation is all too true:

When someone like this dies, it's like standing on the rim of a huge crater. Only as the crater recedes into the past do the survivors comprehend the size of the hole in their lives, appreciate the death's force of impact, and realize all that was vaporized.

More, though. Owen was an inspiration to his friends, and to some of his opponents. That did not end when he perished.

I spent years doing political organizing. Brians' brother, David, was one of my colleagues in those efforts--he was the key voter registration and get out the vote organizer whose activities complemented our voter contact efforts in the early 1970s. That I had his respect was always a source of satisfaction, for Dave's commitment to the work was far greater than mine. David Akers was a formidable organizer, bringing talent and passion to everything he touched. David was quite different from his father, but equally committed to his father's causes.

We lost contact when I moved to Lansing. I'm saddened to learn that he died fairly young.

Postscript: While I was working on this essay, iTunes delivered Rhonda Vincent's performance of Carl Story's If You Don't Love God:

If you say you love Him while you hate your neighbor then you don't have religion. You just told a lie.

Fitting.

PIRGIM's Community Voters Project is working to break this cycle of mutual disinterest [between politicians and the poor] by facilitating increased voter registration and turnout.  In early June, PIRGIM's Community Voters Project opened a full-scale canvass office in Lansing.  The trained, dedicated canvassers in this office hit the streets of Lansing every day, finding, registering, and educating thousands of new voters.  [emphasis added]

An excellent intention, though obviously something went wrong.  A few notes....

Voter turnout efforts generally have three prongs:

1. Voter registration campaign. 
   • Although there are partisan activities in this arena, funding availability and reporting requirements generally push these efforts to organizations which are nominally non-partisan.
     • Since both major parties work with "non-partisan" allies, finger-pointing about it is not really common.
     • Abolishing this practice might be desirable.
   • There are also genuinely non-partisan activities in this arena.  Most people have no difficulty telling the two varieties apart.
2. Likely-supporter identification efforts.
3. • This is where the partisan voter-contact money and effort mainly goes, and was where I worked when I was politicking.  Voter contact activities tend to occur concurrently with voter registration efforts but are a separate activity with different leadership (not so true of the worker bees, though).
   • This effort is mainly about identifying the likelihood that a voter household will support a candidate or a ticket.  In general, this is accomplished by interviewing household members by going door-to-door or by telephoning the home.  There may or may not be an explicit campaign effort attached to the voter contact.
   • Voter ID is a separate organization from the main campaign effort, but generally works closely with candidate organizations.
4. Get-out-the-vote (GOTV) activities on election day.
5. • Everybody gives lip service to high voter turnout.
   • Everyone works to get their own voters to the polls.  That's why we've spent months identifying our supporters, and where those efforts pay off.
     • Attempting to discourage the other side's voters is not unheard of, and takes many forms.  While some of these discouragements are more honorable than others, all corrode the process.
   • Again, there are truly non-partisan groups working in this arena.  Those are upstanding folks, and virtually everyone admires them.

In this schema, PIRGIM counts as a nominally non-partisan group doing voter registration--though they style themselves as genuinely non-partisan.  The clerks who've received the bad registrations are reporting a failure of training and supervision, not one of intention.  The PIRGIM canvassers were apparently paid by the signature, a payment scheme which invites fraud.  The canvassers who created the problem were likely convinced that the faked registrations were harmless, and may have believed they were actually doing something good.  Presumably they didn't expect they'd be caught.  My experience is that enthusiasts can be idiots about this sort of thing--and trust me, folks who run these programs try to hire enthusiasts.

It's still fraud, though, albeit small-scale and individual rather than large-scale and organizational.  The effect  is about the same; the sponsor's credibility takes a hit, as does the election process.  Nothing undermines the credibility of an election like the appearance of dishonesty.

If I'd been running the operation, those documents would have been checked before they got passed to the county clerks.  Since the clerks are consistently reporting that the fraudulent registrations are obvious forgeries, that check shouldn't have required great effort.  Supervision, guys.  Due diligence.  Simple caution.

Notes

• Historically PIRGIM's a Naderite organization, and not particularly a Democratic Party ally  This sort of dissonance makes life interesting.
• Been there.  I helped run a county-wide voter contact campaign for the Kalamazoo Democrats in 1972.  Part of the effort was coordinated by a student group whose only real interest was the presidential contest.  A quick glance at the voter survey sheets returned from the campus made it clear that only the McGovern ratings could be trusted.  Since we caught the fraud before passing the forms to other organizations, the faked forms mainly made my sister angry.  Very angry.

Sargeant Solden explained: Ours was McNair's fourth cycle. Three times he'd gone through Basic at Fort Knox, and three times he'd vanished during the last week of training. Each time Uncle Sam had tracked him down, locked him in the brig for a time, and sent him back to training. This time, Charley Tucker promised, things would be different.

Yeah, sure. On even-numbered days McNair was the best soldier in the camp; on odd-numbered days he was the worst soldier in the camp. It wasn't an attitude thing, exactly--that was always bad, in a sullen sort of way--but it certainly was predictable. On practice day at the rifle range he missed a couple targets; a week later he hit a couple targets when the scores counted. I had the bad fortune to go up against him in Pugil Stick practice; he beat me to a pulp in 30 seconds. The stronger soldiers who followed me into the circle lasted a bit longer. The next day he failed the PT test.

But boy he looked fine while he failed. Good days and bad, the man was impeccable, in a BCT sort of way. His fatigues were always starched, his boots always had a perfect shine, his comportment was beyond reproach. Everything was done with a flair. Even the failures were stylish.

The point was clear enough. The Army had nothing to teach him, and he really wasn't interested in this stuff.

A week from cycle's end he went missing.