Red Gauntlet , SASS 60619

I've never needed a password to come to this site. If I have one, I have no idea what it is.

My grandfather, Edward F. W. Winskill, was a Royal Air Force officer in the First World War. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. in 1895 and raised there. He was an artilleryman in the British Army, then promoted to pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, which became the RAF several months before the war ended. He flew as an artillery spotter (the first combat function of aircraft), went down behind German lines and evaded capture. We still have his RAF uniform with wings, with a Canada patch on the shoulder. He told me that when they made him a pilot officer, he had to grow a mustache and carry a swagger stick... My dad was born in Ladner, BC, on the Fraser River delta. I hunted with my grandad as a boy in the filbert orchards and farms of the Puyallup valley in Washington. I was 29 when he died; I was in the middle of a jury trial at the time, so he got to see me grow up, have kids, and enter my profession. My dad chose US citizenship at 21, and had to carry his papers traveling to Canada and back all of his life. My grandma was a teacher in Point Roberts, which well tell Canadians a lot. She was born in Elizabethtown , Kentucky in 1898. Back then, a woman lost her US citizenship when she married a foreign national. She used to get a kick out of showing us her 1947 naturalization papers (the same year my granddad was naturalized), with its 'born in Kentucky, USA' notation! Oh, Canada! I have many relations still there.

Did we ever find out about the post counts? I showed well over 4,000 posts before, then 1,900-some afterwards.....seems a little strange. I wonder what the criteria were for the "new" count. I haven't heard a thing. I have seen that the provider's employees have been online.

It shows my post total as less than half of what it was. Why's that, and how did it pick the current number? I have no idea. Maybe someone who knows will answer. I don't know how many I had before, so mine may be incorrect too.

As John Harrington said, "Treason doth never prosper; what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason". Charles I was mainly guilty of losing the English Civil War. But then, he started it....

I have several Muslim friends. Two are doctors who have practiced medicine in this community for 40 years. Another is a woman from Turkey who was a secretary in our office for years, whose son was terribly wounded in US Army service in Iraq, and who has risked her own life speaking out against Islamic extremism in many public forums.

Glad you're on the case, pard.

As Badger says, Yakima is cowboy country and I'm sure they can fix you up there.

Was always an Edgar Rice Burroughs guy myself. I never did read any Doc Savage, but I remember seeing gazilions of copies of the paperbacks around....

I confess I use an alias here rather than my real name.

Robert Copeland was a Tacoma lawyer who died shortly before I started practicing law in this city. He was, of course, well-known hereabouts for the actions of the Samuel B. Roberts. I heard many tellings of the Battle Off Samar from my senior partner, Claude M. Pearson, Capt. USNR, who had been a submariner in the War and came to know Copeland well in the Tacoma legal community. (Capt. Pearson was on four war patrols on the USS Pogy. He died just last year at 94; a really fine man.) The story is timeless. A guided-missile frigate was eventually named after Robert W. Copeland.

I've loved that airplane. I was college kid or thereabouts when I first saw one test-flown out of Boeing field. We all pulled over to the side of the highway. It seemed like a dirigible, it was so big!

I liked it, except the note that was held a bit too long. It's not sacred; as long as it's respectful. It was OK in my opinion. The anthem is done hundreds and thousands of times in pretty ordinary fashion.....I do like the sax....

If we're angry at what other people think, we'll always be angry. The NYTimes article I read tonight points out that it is no more possible to secure these areas than bars, malls, etc...Thought it was sensible considering the source.

I already heard about it. But, of course, we'll hear about it here and everywhere, endlessly. I liked it when we heard about it in the newspapers, a couple of days later. There was a lot less of it then, too.