John du Pont Has Died

John Eleuthère du Pont was pronounced dead at 6:55 morning, Dec. 9, at Somerset (Pa) Community Hospital. where he had been taken after being found unresponsive in his prison cell at Laurel Highlands State Prison nearby. He was 72. Authorities say he appears to have died of natural causes.

Du Pont, an heir to the du Pont chemical fortune and who appeared on magazine lists of America’s richest people, was convicted of 3rd degree murder for the Jan.  26, 1996 shooting of Olympic gold medal wrestler Dave Schultz at Foxcatcher Farms which was duPont’s Newtown Square estate.

Third degree murder indicates the lack of intent to kill, and the jury also found him mentally ill. Defense experts testified he had been a paranoid schizophrenic who believed Schultz was part of an international conspiracy to kill him.

He was arrested after a two-day siege at his mansion which was featured on news broadcasts throughout the world. Police took him into custody when he left the house to check on a generator the police had shut off.

Judge Patricia Jenkins sentenced him to 13 to 30 years in State Prison. He was denied parole the first time he became eligible on Jan. 29, 2009.

He is said to be the richest man ever to be convicted of murder in America.

Du Pont was an athlete, a helicopter pilot who assisted local police, and had a Ph.d in natural science from the University of Villanova. The university’s basketball stadium, The Pavilion, was named The Du Pont Pavilion until his conviction. He was also  Villanova’s wrestling coach for a time.

He founded the  Delaware Museum of Natural History in 1957 which opened to the public in 1972.

He was married in 1983 but the marriage lasted only 90 days and was annulled amid allegations of abuse.

Du Pont’s 1987 self-published book “Off The Mat” features photos of himself with presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, and Olympic great Mark Spitz. There is a picture of himself lying in a snowy field with a sniper rifle  which describes him as a “dedicated public servant and volunteer law enforcement officer” joining “in a winter midnight manhunt”.

After his mother  Jean Liseter Austin du Pont died in 1988, du Pont became more erratic. The editor of the local weekly remembers receiving a phone call from him crying and asking why the obituary had not been published.

He began calling himself the Dalai Lama dressing  in a long, red robe.

He lost his coaching slot at Villanova after wrestlers began objecting to his behavior. A lawsuit was filed by an assistant coach alleging he had been fired because he spurned a request from du Pont to be his lover.

Du Pont’s answering machine message became “You have reached the John du Pont residence. I am probably here right now but I am screening my calls.”

Finally, one January day he approached Dave Schultz who was working on his car at a guest house on the estate. Schultz looked up and said “hi coach” and du Pont shot him three times killing him.

Du Pont’s Foxcatcher Farms estate has been broken up for development. Much of it is now the new home of the storied Episcopal Academy .

John du Pont Has Died
John du Pont Has Died

Delco Pa Keeps Quiet Its Connections To Greatness

A 5-foot-tall bust or Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has been finished  by world-renowned sculptor Zenos Frudakis and is scheduled to be unveiled 2 p.m., Thursday, completing Chester, Pa.’s $500,000 Martin Luther King Jr. Park at Sixth and Engle streets.

Good for Chester to highlight its connections to one of the most influential and noble Americans of the 20th century. Rev. King lived in the city for three years  serving Calvary Baptist Church , 1616 W. 2nd St., while studying at the Crozer Theological Seminary.

The park project came about as a result of a request in the late 1990s by members of the city’s clergy to honor Rev. King. Three decades after his death the city had not so much as named a street after him. Mayor Dominic Pileggi, now a state senator, suggested the park thinking that a street-naming might be a bit anticlimactic since at least 40 other cities had already done so.

And while the park was the right call there is nothing wrong with  a street-naming as well. Changing 2nd Street where Rev. King’s old church lies, and  which is State Route  291, into Martin Luther King Jr. Highway should be a no-brainer. Actually, it should be a no-brainer to do it for its entire length through Delaware County.

Always underestimated Delaware County for reasons unknown likes to keep quiet its connections to greatness.

Who, for instance, has heard of Philip Jaisohn ? Old-time county residents might remember him as their family doctor, but Jaisohn is the equivalent of Benjamin Franklin to the South Koreans. His home in Upper Providence was site of a pilgrimage by Korean President and Nobel peace laureate the late Kim Dae Jung.

While there is a memorial to Jaisohn in Rose Tree Park, one would think that there might be a street named for him somewhere as well.

One would think that the county’s tourist bureau would at least be trying to publicize these connections. Of course, when the county insists on calling itself Brandywine Country a serious problem of self-image is evident.

 

Delco Pa Keeps Quiet Its Connections To Greatness

Delco Pa Keeps Quiet Its Connections To Greatness

Phone Book Ends

Phone Book Ends == Verizon Pennsylvania’ s white pages —  the traditional phone book — will now only be delivered upon request.

The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, Nov. 4, gave unanimous approval to a request by the company to change its tradition of including the listing with the distribution of its 12-million revenue producing yellow pages.

Verizon says they are doing it for the environment and that the move will save 200 tons of paper per year.

Verizon says the listings can be found on its website. It also says it is willing to provide them via a DVD.

The blue pages containing the numbers for government agencies and social services will remain.

Yellowbook, Verizon’s competitor, will continue to distribute white pages along with the paid advertising in its yellow pages.

Those still wanting a Verizon Pa. white pages should call its directory distribution center  at 800-888-8448.

The white page listing can  be found at http://www.verizon.com/whitepages.

 Phone Book Ends

Phone Book Ends

Woodrow Wilson, Democrat Hero

Judith McGrane of Springfield submitted this about women demonstrating for the right to vote outside the White House were treated in 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson.

Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden’s blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of ‘obstructing sidewalk traffic.’

They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air.
They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate,

Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the ‘Night of Terror’ on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson’s White House for the right to vote.

For weeks, the women’s only water came from an open pail. Their food, all of it colorless slop, was infested with worms.
When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.

The above is from an email that has been circulating around the internet for some time. Snopes rates it as true.

What makes this especially interesting is that Woodrow Wilson, the man who gave us the income tax and Federal Reserve Board, is almost deified by progressive liberals. Wilson was a Democrat albeit not of the Jefferson-Jackson mold. He was an academic who at one time taught at Bryn Mawr College. He made his bones as president of Princeton University from where he was elected governor of New Jersey in 1910 followed by his election to the presidency in 1912 beating a divided Republican Party.

Wilson sympathies lay with the Jim Crow south and he was baldy racist. He segregated federal office buildings for the first time, praised the Ku Klux Klan and told a delegation of blacks objecting to his policies  “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen .”

In other words, he was a typical, manipulative progressive, liberal, big-government Democrat.

 

Wittgenstein, Hitler And Rush

Ludwig Wittgenstein is considered one of history’s great philosophers. He was born in Austria on April 26,1889, six days after another influential Austrian, who is right now ranked third on the list of history’s top murderers behind Mao and Stalin.

Well, Wittgenstein went to school at Realschule in Linz which had a student population of 300 pupils, and one of his classmates was Adolph Hitler.

It has now been reveled that talk-show giant Rush Limbaugh and Pastor Terry Jones of maybe-I-will-maybe-I-won’t burn the Koran fame were classmates at Cape Central High School in Cape Girardeau, Mo.

Some appear to want to make an issue of this. Rush says he barely remembers the guy and wonders why people can’t accept that. He noted these same people easily accepted claims by one prominent person that he  spent 20 years in a church without being able to recall what his own minister had been preaching.

USS Olympia Vs Stimulus Signs And Yankees

USS Olympia Vs Stimulus Signs And Yankees

Historical apathy is threatening to do what the Spanish Navy could not and that is send the USS Olympia to a watery grave.

The cruiser which is berthed at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia was the flagship of Admiral Dewey’s fleet at the Battle of Manila Bay on May 1, 1898 during the Spanish American War and from which he uttered the famous command “You May Fire When You Are Ready, Gridley”

It is the oldest steel-hulled ship afloat, and is an important record of 19th century transitional technology.

The owner of the ship, the Independence Seaport Museum, says it cannot afford the $20 million-plus to maintain it.

While $20 million is a lot, spending it on the ship would provide honest American jobs to save an treasure than could never be recovered if it should be lost. It would certainly be less of a waste than spending $20 million in federal money on propaganda signs for the “Stimulus” Act; or $20 million to repair a minor league ballpark in Lackawanna County for the New York Yankees, an institution that wouldn’t blink at paying that plus 50 percent for single-season’s work from a third-baseman.

Worst comes to worst maybe they can move it down the river to Delaware County which has managed to find $30 million for a soccer stadium and talk the state into chipping in another $47 million.

A nation that forgets its history is not going to last. Those in the 19th century understood this.

USS Olympia Vs Stimulus Signs And Yankees

 

Change Opportunity For Jim Thorpe, Pa?

Change Opportunity For Jim Thorpe, Pa?  — Sunday’s New York Times’ sports section  carried a large story on the continuing saga of Jack Thorpe’s attempts to bring the bones of his father  back to his home state of Oklahoma from his grave in Jim Thorpe, Pa.

The Pennsylvania sports legend was buried in 1953 in the small borough that is the Carbon County seat after his wife, Patricia, who was Thorpe’s third wife and Jack’s stepmother, became angered at Oklahoma’s refusal to erect a monument to her husband. The Pennsylvania boroughs of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk were merging and offered to not just do so but to rename the new municipality in his honor if she would let him be buried there.

Thorpe never set foot in the place. His road to fame started 100 miles southwest at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School which he led to a national collegiate football championship in 1912.

Jack, 73, is now suing in federal court demanding the bones be returned in compliance with Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. One has to admit that it is a bit of a stretch to use a law aimed at preventing the desecration of Indian grave sites to move Thorpe’s bones considering Thorpe was a life-long Catholic, a quarter Irish and a quarter French, and had never been buried anywhere else. Federal judges, however, have certainly been known to be whimsical in their interpretation of law especially in the pursuit of political correctness and praise from the wine and cheese set.

Perhaps, it would be best for the borough to cut its losses and let the bones go. Of course, then it would need a new name.  Maybe there is a long-ago sports great looking to return to a little bit of spotlight by agreeing to let his body be buried there. How does Mark Spitz, Pa. sound? Bruce Jenner, Pa.? Randall Cunningham, Pa.? Greg Gross , Pa.? They could open it for bids. The possibilities are endless. Feel free to make a suggestion.

Change Opportunity For Jim Thorpe, Pa?

 

Star-Spangled Banner’s Final Verse

Star-Spangled Banner’s Final Verse — The complete lyrics to the Star-Spangled Banner. The last verse can be heard movingly sung by a former Marine at a Tea Party rally by clicking here .

O! say can you see by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,

Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore

That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand

Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave![12]

 

Star-Spangled Banner’s Final Verse

 

Star-Spangled Banner's Final Verse

Pa Treasures Rot While Pols Get Fat

Pa Treasures Rot While Pols Get Fat

Pa Treasures Rot While Pols Get Fat
An historic miner’s house at Eckley Miners Village circa August 2009

The USS Olympia, a national treasure berthed in Philadelphia, is in need of up to $30 million to keep her afloat and its owner, Independence Seaport Museum, has gone on record as being unable to do that.

The ship, docked at Penn’s Landing across the Delaware River from the USS New Jersey, was Commodore George Dewey’s flagship at the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War and from whose bridge he uttered the words “You may fire when ready, Gridley”. It is one of the very few vessels from that era still in existence.

A few miles south opposite an IKEA store on Columbus Boulevard, the faded hull of the SS United States, once the fastest and among the most famous ships in the world, rusts away at Pier 82.

In Northeast Pennsylvania, the historic homes of Eckley Miners Village collapse under the not-so-watchful eye of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Reportedly, the Commission has refused volunteer help in maintaining the homes.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration and his fellow Democrats sit on billions of dollars allocated to provide stimulus to the economy. What could be a better way of providing jobs than spending some of that on restoring some of these bits of history using local labor? Heritage maintenance is actually an legitimate role of government. FDR practiced it in our last depression.

Of course, Obama doesn’t seem all that concerned about our heritage and this kind of spending doesn’t provide that much opportunity for bonuses for connected Democratic fat cats at Goldman Sachs and GMAC.

Meanwhile, retiring state legislators such as Senator Robert Mellow (D-22) are finding that their pensions are going to be almost three times that of the $110,000 salaries they collect while working.

Meanwhile, gym teachers are making $87,000 for 195 days of work.

People, it’s time to start getting mad.

Pa Treasures Rot While Pols Get Fat

Nazi Midwinter Holiday

The Nazis hated Christianity and Christmas posed a problem to them since it was Germany’s most popular holiday. Rather than ban it, they tried to replace it as described in this story at the TimesOnline, the website for the paper most of us in the U.S. know as The Times of London albeit in the U.K. it is simply the Times.

The Nazis replaced carols praising Jesus with secular songs about the season — winter wonderlands so to speak. They insisted Christmas trees be called fir trees, light trees or Jultrees.

They insisted the event, Julfest or Wintersonnenwende (Winter Solstice), be one  to remember Germanic ancestors and soldiers. Here is an example of how it was supposed to be done according to a popular women’s magazine at the time:

Nazi Midwinter Holiday Wintersonnenwende

Something like that could never happen in Pennsylvania or the United States, right?

As you enter a store during the next several weeks and are greeted for the season as attempts are made to sell you gifts for some undefined holiday; and if you see fir trees being sold for some unnameable event and if  you see displays of such  trees decorated with lights and called “festivals of light”, and if the local public school holds a “Winter Solstice” concert, well, just remember the tradition being followed.

Nazi Midwinter Holiday