October, 2023

 I haven't posted much on this blog lately. I used to write about all the places I visited, one or two a month, and post lots of pictures, mostly of historic places. It took hours, and at most 20 people would read what I wrote. Lately, I've been putting a few pictures on Facebook, without much commentary, and 75 or 80 people give me a "like" or make a comment. 

I've also gotten a lot more private about how I'm feeling and what I'm doing. I was diagnosed, long ago, with "mild, chronic depression," whatever that means, But turning 74 last week really hurt. I know I'm in better shape than most men my age, the ones who haven' t died yet, anyway, and when I look in the mirror, I think I look better than most my age. Still, I've had two cancer diagnoses since the summer, one a skin cancer thing that was ugly, but is fixed except for a scar. I'm scheduled for an operation to remove my thyroid gland this Friday, November 3, and that is stressing me out. The doctors thought they saw something on my pancreas this summer, but after an endoscopy, said it wasn't a big deal, "come back in six months" and have it rechecked. Then they called two weeks later to tell me they wanted to take another look. My mother lived with pancreatic cancer for fifteen months. She was diagnosed at the age I was in August. She said at the time "How long was I going to live anyway?" I think about that a lot. She and I too, don't want to end up in a nursing home, like her mother, my grandmother, with no memory of anything. And I feel like my time has come and gone. The world is not what it was and, while at one time I had some power in it, now I don't think I do.

I ran for Congress last year against a MAGA-Republican hack who had not done anything in several terms of office, who beat a more rational Republican in a primary with signs that had his name over Trump's. He never appeared in this area, which was new to him, refused to debate, and didn't run a campaign. We did an interview together with the Morgantown Dominion-Post where we could only answer questions, not debate. I didn't think he had anything to say, and the paper endorsed me. I won only in this county. The race wasn't close, only closer than predicted. He's now running for Senate against our Governor, Jim Justice, a shameless liar, deadbeat and grifter, originally elected as a Democrat, who switched to the Republican Party in short order. I was at the state convention where he was nominated, and almost no one at the convention liked him, in fact, most of us there walked out of his speech. Joe Manchin wanted him, so that's who we got. He has a high popularity rating in the state. Don't ask me how that is possible.

It's not just this state. The Republicans, who have a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, just elected a speaker, without Democratic support. He has railed against same-gender marriage and abortion rights, which one might expect from a radical Christofascist, but he also is open to cutting Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid, against aid to Ukraine, and wrote many of Trump's lawsuits arguing, falsely, that he won the 2020 election. This is what the United States has come to. 

Meanwhile, there is a war in Israel-Gaza-Palestine. My friends on the right blame Obama and Biden and say Trump would have taken care of this. My friends on the left think Israel is totally the villain here, that the country is a "colonial power," engages in "apartheid" and "genocide." I grew up in an apartheid state called "Maryland" and as to genocide and "colonialism" if you're an American of European origin, you need to tread carefully, given our history on this continent. Yes, Israel could conform to international law and not risk murdering innocent civilians, But Hamas has to go. There should have been a reckoning a long time ago among the nations about Palestine, but no one wants to touch it. Israel took in Jewish refugees from Iraq, Iran, Egypt and the rest of the Arab world, yet Palestinians cling to the false hope that they will be able to turn back the clock, and they've lived in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt for 75 years. The Jewish homeland is in Israel/Palestine. There is nowhere else. I've seen signs that say "Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism." It's a thin line. Jewish students at Cornell are afraid to leave their rooms, and in a former Soviet republic, protestors attacked a plane from Tel Aviv, looking for Jews to beat up. It's scary now for all of us. When I was in high school, a speaker came to my Jewish youth group. He was a Holocaust survivor from Poland, and had been in college in Poland in the 1930s. He was probably only 45 at the time he spoke to us, but he told us that Jews were treated badly by other Polish students and faculty at his campus. I am reminded of that by the events today.

I'm out of patience with everyone. While on City Council, I was called a "centrist" which was a high insult to the person who lobbed that word at me. I still consider myself on the left, but I don't really fit in that community anymore. The Republican Party would love to reach out to me and profess how they "Love Israel." It's American Jews they don't much care for, especially those of us in same-gender marriages who also think corporations have too much power.

You might notice that I'm not relaxed. I'm working on it. Tonight is Halloween, and I'll give out candy to the goblins and ghouls who come to our door. Tomorrow, November 1, is the 15th anniversary of my marriage to Joe Hample, and we'll celebrate that milestone. Friday is my operation, and I'm told that the prognosis is good. 

I still want to live, I'm just not sure I want to continue to interact with the rest of the world. Maybe I'll just fade away as I continue to age. I'll update this when/if I recover.

Johnstown, Cambria County, and the Flight 93 Memorial for 9/11

This past weekend there was a free Brad Paisley concert on the hill at WVU's law school Friday night and a football game Saturday afternoon. It seemed a good time to get out of Morgantown.

My next county to visit was Cambria County, Pennsylvania. Although Johnstown is the largest city, the county seat is at Ebensburg, twenty-three miles northeast of there and one hundred twenty-one miles from Morgantown. It's one of the larger counties I'm visiting, and far enough away to merit an overnight stay. I took a toll-free way to get to Johnstown, winding through southern Pennsylvania's countryside. It took two and a half hours to go eighty-five miles. I didn't stop on the way.

I stayed with a cheaper branch of my customary motel chain, located, for once, near the center of the city. Johnstown has a central square with a fountain and a gazebo, just a few blocks from the hotel. There was also a small farmers' market at the square. The weather was warm and overcast, much the same as in Morgantown. I found a little café on the square, and had a salad for lunch.

According to the U.S. Census, Cambria County is estimated to have 136, 411 people in 2015, down from a peak of 213,459 in 1940. In 2000, the population was ninety-five percent Caucasian. Part of the decline was from heavy industry leaving the area, and part from disastrous floods in 1889, 1936 and 1977. The 1889 flood, the most famous, killed thousands of people when an earthen dam, built to create an artificial lake upstream, failed and sent water crashing into the town. Most of the city had to be completely rebuilt after that flood. The walls along the river were built after the 1936 flood, and were supposed to prevent further flooding. Still, the town flooded again in 1977.

I saw many Catholic churches in the county. There were Trump signs on lawns; not one Hillary sign. and  also signs saying "Push The Pushers Out" with a number to call to report drug transactions. Apparently, this is a big problem. There were blue ribbons on many trees. It is part of a "Teal Campaign" for ovarian cancer.

I had marked out ten of the thirty places on the National Register to visit. As usual, I didn't stick to that, because there were many of them a short walk away in central Johnstown. Here are the places I saw in Johnstown Friday afternoon:

The fountain in Central Square

The former Nathan's Department Store

A food truck at the farmers' market at Central Square

Grand Army of the Republic Hall, built for Union Civil War Veterans

Across the Conemaugh River,

The 1891 Carnegie Library, now the Johnstown Flood Museum

Community building, originally used by Cambria Iron Company

Cambria Iron  Company former offices

Cambria Iron Company factory, now abandoned

Johnstown City Hall

one of the rare streets where the houses appear to be pre-1889

View from the top of the Johnstown Incline Railroad

Johnstown Incline Railroad

The bridge leading to Johnstown's Incline Railroad

I attended synagogue Friday night at Beth Shalom, the only remaining congregation in the area. There was an exhibit in the lobby about the Jewish history of the town, and it is like small-town Jewish stories everywhere. At one time, many of the merchants were Jews, and there were three active synagogues, two of which built new buildings around 1950 in the suburbs west of town, above the incline railroad. With a declining Jewish population, the synagogues merged into one in the 1970s, keeping the newest building and letting the others go.

I headed out to that suburb at six, looking for a restaurant I found on line, and Westmont Historic District, directly atop the Incline. I couldn't find the restaurant and settled for a sandwich at a chain sub shop before heading to services. There were thirteen of us in attendance, counting the rabbi. We used a Reform siddur. Most of the people were elderly. I spoke to a few of them.

Westmont Historic District

Beth Shalom, Southmont

Saturday was to be a short day, heading out to the places in the county away from Johnstown, then leaving for home about one. I left my hotel at 8:15 on a beautiful sunny morning.  I started at the Johnstown Flood Memorial, east of the city. There was a lake, surrounded by resort home, created from the damming of the Little Conemaugh River. After a heavy rain on May 31, 1889, the dam broke and the flooding downstream destroyed most of Johnstown. The valley below the house in the picture was the lake.

This is from the visitor's center at the Johnstown Flood National Memorial, run by The National Park Service.

This was the clubhouse that once sat on South Fork Lake. It is being restored

 I headed north through small towns along State Road 53.

Historic District in the borough of Portage

Portage

 

 Another National Park Service site is Allegheny Portage National Historic Site. The eastern border of Cambria County is at the peak of the Appalachians. There were steam-powered engines that pulled trains and boats over the mountains on rail lines. At the visitor center, I met a couple from Georgia. We commiserated about the election, and she told me about a senior visitors' pass for only ten dollars that gets one into National Park Service sites for free. The ranger, a young man whose last name is Rager, didn't think I was 62, bless his heart. We talked some about parks. He likes Shenandoah, which Joe and I visited. I said I liked it, but I was spoiled by Yosemite, the most beautiful place I have ever been. He said he wanted to go there, but San Francisco was high on his list because he wants to go to Amoeba Records. Small world. I asked him what artists he likes, and I, to my embarrassment, didn't recognize any of the names.

At Appalachian Portage National Historic site. This is an engine house.

 Ebensburg, the county seat, is much smaller than Johnstown, and appears to be more prosperous.

Cambria County Jail, Ebensburg

A.W. Buck House, now Cambria County Historical Society, Ebensburg, 1889 and 1903

Cambria County Courthouse, Ebensburg

Beach at Prince Gallitzin State Park

Prince Gallitzin Park, according to Wikipedia, "is named for Demetrius Gallitzin, a Russian nobleman turned Catholic priest who was instrumental in the settlement of Cambria County." The park is at the northern end of the county.

By 1 P.M. Saturday, I was just finishing up in Ebensburg. I still wanted to see the mall east of Johnstown, and the campus of University of Pittsburgh in Johnstown. And there was a car show at a church near the college campus and a "town center" development, all on the way home.

I went to the mall, called "The Galleria." It's like Morgantown's mall, only many of the stores have closed. I had a dish of chicken teriyaki served by a Vietnamese women who called me "darling" and "sweetie." I took a few minutes to check out the college campus, and, yes, the car show. The car owners, as at other shows, are all crazy men my age.

On the campus of The University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown

1961 Plymouth painted in honor of those killed on Flight 93 on 9/11

1968 Plymouth Fury

1965 Plymouth convertible

1959 Ford Skyliner Hardtop-Convertible

I had read in the paper in Johnstown about ceremonies at the site where Flight 93 crashed on 9/11 near Shanksville, in Somerset County, just south of Cambria County. It was almost on the way home. The paper said there would be a candle ceremony Saturday. That, as it turns out, was private, and after dark. Still there were many people there that day to remember and commemorate.

The field where the plane crashed was a surface coal mine, "reclaimed," meaning covered with dirt. Nothing was growing there. The monument, by architecture firm Paul Murdoch Architects, sits at the top of a low hill. The landscape design, a field of wildflowers on the old mining site and forty groves of forty trees (still incomplete) is by Nelson Byrd Woltz. There is parking at the bottom of the hill, then a walkway leading to a white wall, with marble slabs commemorating each of the forty people on the plane. There is a low wall left of the walkway, with only a boulder marking where the plane crashed, creating a fifteen foot deep crater, now covered. The visitor center is up the hill, on a winding path from the memorial.

The visitor center across the field of wildflowers

The memorial wall

Mark Bingham was the gay rugby player from San Francisco who helped organize the passengers to fight the terrorists

A closer look at the visitor center

The walkway to the visitor's center

I didn't stay long at the top. It was hot out, and I wanted to get home. I looked at some of the exhibits. Much of it was old television news shows with the planes flying into the World Trade Center and the newscasters obvious horror. It was hard enough to watch fifteen years ago; I didn't really want to see it again. 9/11 is not something I dwell on, and had I not been so close, I might never have gone to that memorial. I left there at 5 P.M. and was home, eighty-two miles away by 7. Traffic in Morgantown was still backed up from the football game.

The Election and What I'm Doing About It

This is one of those election years where no one really knows what will happen. The "Brexit" vote in England went against all predictions. Politicians there borrowed from Donald Trump's playbook here: bash immigrants, "The Elite" and prey on the legitimate fears of working class Caucasians that they are being left out of this so-called "recovery." They have a point, except that immigrants, gays, and women having abortions are clearly not the problem.

I have never voted for a Republican, and I don't plan to start now. In my campaign for West Virginia Delegate, I aligned myself with the Bernie Sanders people. This was not political calculation on my part (although Sanders won in every county in West Virginia). I am thrilled that a candidate came up who was willing to talk about economic inequality, breaking up the big banks, and being inclusive of everyone in our country. Although Sanders is not traditionally religious, he embraces core Jewish values, whether he knows it or not.

I don't believe Hillary Clinton is a crook or even a bad person. She would have been a great candidate in 2000 or 2004. She lost to a brash outsider in 2008, and I believe she deserves to lose now. Only the system is rigged in her favor. Sanders pointed out in an interview in Rolling Stone that despite winning in every county in West Virginia, six of our eight superdelegates are pledged to Clinton.

Things are worse than that in West Virginia. Our Democratic Senator, Joe Manchin, did not appear at the state's Democratic convention, except at a lunch he sponsored in honor of the Democratic Party's West Virginia chair, Belinda Biafore. There was an election for a new state chair, and Chris Regan, a hero to progressives in this state, was defeated for the position of state chair. Still, we passed a progressive platform from the floor of the convention. I'm sure the platform will be ignored. That's how things roll here.

There's hostility in this state  from Democrats toward their anointed leaders. Jim Justice, a coal mogul, Republican until last year, and the wealthiest person in West Virginia, has not taken positions on most issues. Our Attorney General candidate, Doug Reynolds, has an anti-gay, anti-choice and pro-gun voting record. Ugh. And Hillary Clinton's record of being the Senator from Wall Street has not helped her with working people here.

I've been fending off people on Facebook who post horrible anti-Clinton stuff. Not Republicans, because I have "unfollowed" them, but Democrats. At this point, I'm hoping for a convention miracle that will give Bernie the nomination, or at least that the platform will accept his ideas, for what that's worth. Still, if Clinton gets the nomination, I will support her.

On the Republican side, there is shock and outrage every time Trump opens his mouth. Republican stalwarts are abandoning ship for fear they will be tarred with his legacy and shamed forever. To me, the Republican Party has pandered to racists and gay-haters for decades. Trump only says what they've been thinking all along, only with his Outer Borough lack of manners and WASP "tastefulness." They deserve him.

This year, we will have to eat shit (to put it delicately) and vote for the Democrats. For the future, I would hope progressives and unionists will form a new, more open party, pro-union, pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-diversity, and pro-environment. We can start by electing local leaders who can reach everyone , uniting anti-corporate, pro-worker, inclusive people of good will to overturn the status quo in West Virginia and in the United States. We have our work cut out for us.

Bernie, Hillary and Donald

During my unsuccessful campaign for Delegate to the West Virginia State Legislature, I met many young people who were working for or supporting Bernie Sanders. I admired their idealism, which reminded me of the Gene McCarthy people in 1968. I support Bernie Sanders for President, so we became friends.

I recently posted an article on Facebook from American Prospect by Harold Meyerson suggesting that the "Bernie Bros" step back and let Hillary Clinton work against Donald Trump. He is surprised that Sanders supporters say they won't vote for Clinton, thus handing the election to Trump. Meyerson says he is a Sanders supporter and believes in "Socialist Democracy," but that Sanders has no chance to win the nomination, and we must turn our attention to the general election.

I have friends, very close friends, in fact, who are Hillary Clinton fans, although I am not one of them. I respect their reasons for supporting Clinton. I know people who are Trump supporters. I have generally unfollowed them on Facebook, or avoid being around them. Still, the outpouring of support for Trump, particularly in West Virginia, is understandable. People like Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney talking about how tax cuts for the very rich will help everyone, well, no one can fall for that anymore. And most people, even economic conservatives, are not as crazy or as personally unlikable as Ted Cruz. Trump is outgoing and has a message of hope. His comments about women, immigrants and Moslems has scared off support from just about anyone in the Jewish community. The cheers he got at AIPAC show how out of touch that organization is. Jewish clergy of every stripe have denounced Trump's stand on immigration.

Meyerson's article sparked a not-typical firestorm on my Facebook feed, between the Clinton lovers, those who will vote for her because they see Trump as the biggest threat to the country, and the Sanders people who said they will vote for the Green Party or sit out the presidential race. They claim to be revolutionaries who will not settle for the status quo.

The most influential factor in which side people were on was age. People my age were in the Hillary camp, or better-Hiilary-than Donald category. People under thirty were  the revolutionaries, willing to go down in flames for Bernie Sanders' cause.

I probably would have voted for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, if the vote had been extended to nineteen year olds at that time. I started that year as a McCarthy supporter, but I became a Robert Kennedy supporter when he entered the race. Kennedy spoke at Johns Hopkins that spring, where I was a freshman. His assassination, never really fully investigated, and with an official story full of holes, left me with psychic scars that have not healed, and a deep distrust of our government. I also heard Spiro Agnew that year at Towson State. He was an ignorant bigoted clown. It was inconceivable to me that he could ever be vice-president.

When the Sanders people say that Clinton has engaged in dirty tricks, like flooding Sanders websites with porn so the sites would have to be taken down, or claim that she is beholden to big banks, or to Gulf State oligarchs and Saudi princes, I just shrug and say "So, what's new?" Back in 2008, I said (probably over breakfast with Joe) that we might get some sort of social justice from Obama, but we were never going to get economic justice. And in fact, Obama eventually came out in favor of gay rights, and has run an inclusive administration. He has tried to bring people together (a thankless and impossible task). Still, he appointed Timothy Geithner, of the International Monetary Fund, as Treasury Secretary, and allowed big banks to gain back, and even surpass the power they had before the 2008 crash.

I am with my peers. I will support Hillary Clinton for President, knowing all the negatives about her. At the Democratic Convention in Charleston next month, I will still support Bernie Sanders. My goal now will be to stop Trump. None of our choices for President are good. 

Maybe one day we will get economic fairness, probably not this year. I'll settle for maintaining the social progress we have made in the last eight years, because I don't have a choice.