Reflections

Hello everyone, hope you had a great Indepen-dence Day.  
We’ve made it a practice for the last several years to stay home, have the family, those available,  and cook out and basically have a quiet celebration.  Jamie’s birthday was the third and we had a conference call with him and that way everybody got to talk with him.  
In addition to the classes, he teaches for  two  online  universities, he has accepted an internship with  a major sports magazine which may lead to a full-time position. Naturally he is excited as well as us, and we wish him the best.  
He’s been doing freelance writing for some magazines for several years and this will be an excellent opportunity for him.  
Back to the Fourth, I remember Papa Badley recalling the railroad picnics that Illinois Central would have.
They would offer excursions at almost no cost and families would bring picnic lunches and and have a really festive day visiting with friends.  In those days, when they didn’t have cars, most people  were born, lived and died in roughly a 25 mile area.
Like him or not, when Henry Ford made the Model T affordable, we started becoming a mobile society.  This created the need for more and better roads which in turn created more jobs, the need for service stations, auto supply stores, garages, and automobile agencies, which is really the domino effect you’ve always heard about.  
When Ford established a minimum daily wage of five dollars, the rest of the old robber barons said he would wreck the country.  He realized that assembly line work the most boring job in the world and his turn over was over 100 percent each year, and he wanted his workers to be able to buy the cars they were producing, so he benefitted in two ways.  
The socialist crowd in Washington think that by giving more and more people hand outs they’ll keep getting elected, but the fallacy in that is people getting hand outs have just enough to exist but very  little to spend on other things and sooner or later the give away bunch will   run out of other people’s money.  
That’s all for my soap box this week, so I’d like to engage in a little trivial pursuit.  I know that people in my age group have fond memories of the old Grand Theater, which in the pre TV days gave us so much satisfaction on  a Saturday afternoon.  
Most kids wanted to sit on the front row but probably because I wore glasses I learned I could see better about half way down. The other day I saw a review of the new Lone Ranger movie and for once I agree with the critic.  I remember when the first Lone Ranger came out as a weekly serial and we all tried not to miss an episode.  
In retrospect it was silly then but we thought it was great.  The TV series was worse and now, according to the reviews, this version has really reached an all time low.   
We were naive little kids then, but audiences today  have higher expectations and the only way we can give them the message is at the box office.   
That’s it for this week so let me hear from you with any suggestions you might have.  My email address is cncooper1@hotmail.com or write me at P.O. Box 613189 Memphis, TN 38101 and have a great week.