New York City

An irreverent look at this day in history, April 3

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

In 1882, my fellow Missourian Jesse James was shot in the back of the head and killed by a man he’d recruited to help him rob a bank in Platte City. Rumors persist to this day that James faked his death, even though 1995 DNA analysis of the body buried in Kearney, Missouri under a headstone reading “Jesse James” proved 99.7% conclusive. A man named Frank Dalton died in Granbury, Texas at the age of 104 in 1951 and he claimed to his dying day that he was Jesse James. Dalton’s body was to be exhumed in 2000 for DNA analysis and the story was a media sensation that you might remember. You probably don’t remember the results, because a mismarked gravestone caused the body of a one-armed man who died in 1927 to be exhumed instead, and the body buried as “Jesse James, supposedly killed in 1882” has yet to be tested. Despite the 1995 tests, citizens of Gransbury and citizens of Kearney still argue over which of them has the real Jesse James.
In other news, Adolf Hitler, FDR, Abraham Lincoln and Elvis were last spotted playing cards together in Argentina.

In 1826, Boss Tweed was born. Tweed was the political boss of the Tammany Hall machine in New York City. Their motto: Vote early and often. Tweed’s downfall came when one of his own men felt he got shortchanged when the embezzled money was split up, so he ratted to the New York Times. Tweed was imprisoned twice, on criminal and then on civil charges. He escaped and fled to Spain in December 1875, only to be recognized (supposedly a series of famous political cartoons gave him away) and he was returned to New York, where he died in prison in 1878.

In 1783, Washington Irving was born. I’m sure you’ve read his Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow or seen at least one of the many movies or Scooby Doo episodes based on it.

In 1942 and 1944, singers Wayne Newton and Tony Orlando, respectively, were born. Branson, Missouri would never be the same.

Looking for stock video footage?

Dave Farquhar Video , ,

I’ve talked about archive.org before. I revisited it this evening. As usual, another hundred or so films have been added. A handful of selections from another library, owned by the University of South Carolina, have trickled in.
But most importantly, many of the films in the Prelinger collection, which currently numbers 1,255 films, now have descriptions and the ability to view with RealPlayer in streaming format. So if you need a clip showing New York City, you can do a search and view the films to see if the clip is suitable before you spend a lot of time downloading a monster MPEG-2 file.

And since the copyright on these films has long since lapsed (if ever it was copyrighted in the first place), you can use it.

Some of the films are interesting to watch in their own right. The film The Challenge of Ideas shows just how much we’ve changed in 40 years. Some of the changes are good–virtually all of the narrators held lit cigarettes in their right hand as they spoke.

But as I watched, I couldn’t help but think the ACLU would never permit this film to be made by the U.S. Government today. For one thing, it showed churches and used the now-controversial phrase “Nation under God.”

The film talked about winning to Cold War in people’s minds. But the film’s description of the Soviets sounds an awful lot like today’s United States. Meanwhile, our values infiltrated the former Soviet Union. So who really did win the Cold War?

There’s also a lot of footage that shows the flip-side of the fifties. I remember in my 20th Century U.S. History class in college, my professor drove home the thought that Happy Days was a myth–there was a darker side. The films in this archive certainly show that–the beginnings of the demolition of historic neighborhoods to build pre-fab buildings, drug addiction, oppression. And of course there was the ever-present threat of war. I don’t know that the Fabulous Fifties were actually any darker than the decades that followed it. But they don’t seem to have been much better.

This stuff almost makes me want to be a history teacher.

But I’ll probably just abuse it as stock footage instead. I don’t have to go back to school to do that.

Where are we now?

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , , , , ,

It’s September 11, and I’m mad.
I’m not mad at the government for not finding Osama Bin Laden. The government sent him running. He’s weaker today than he was a year ago. I can be patient about the day he finally gets sent to the universe’s highest court.

I’m not even certain that I’m mad at Bin Laden. One of my college professors said you can’t get mad at a dog for barking. That’s what dogs do. Can I get mad at a raving lunatic with money and a bunch of guns and no guts for brainwashing some of his henchmen and making them hijack some airplanes on suicide missions? Just as dogs bark, that’s what raving lunatics with money and a bunch of guns and no guts do.

But given the opportunity, I’d still shoot him. Nothing personal. It’s my duty to my country. Raving lunatics with money and a bunch of guns and no guts brainwash henchmen into hijacking planes and slamming them into buildings. Patriotic Americans protect their fellow countrymen against enemies of the state.

No, what I’m mad about is the headline I read this morning that said church activity is back down to its pre-9/11/01 levels.

Osama Bin Laden hit a really easy pop-up to Christianity. And we fumbled it, let it squirt out of our glove. And then we didn’t even bother to run after the ball afterward and catch him off guard.

“This is not what the beautiful religion of Islam is about,” some said after 9/11. Here’s what the beautiful religion of Islam is all about: Do a bunch of deeds. When you die, Allah might let you into heaven. There is no assurrance. No security. You live your life, doing deeds, hoping it’s going to be enough.

Christianity can be summed up in two verses:

God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him will never die, but have eternal life. –John 3:16

I write these words to you who have believed in Him so that you may know that you have eternal life. –1 John 5:13

It’s not about deeds because it’s not about you. Believe in Jesus Christ, then let Him work in you. Deeds follow. But the deeds don’t get you into heaven–the deeds are just confirmation that you’re going to heaven. You’re saved before you’ve done your first good deed. Remember the story of the crucifixion? The thief on the cross asked Jesus to remember him when He came into His kingdom. And Jesus said, “Today, you’ll be with me in paradise.” How many good deeds do you think that thief did between the time he said that and the time he died? He didn’t exactly have the ability, did he?

Christianity offers all the beauty of Islam, and then some.

After Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani invited speakers from all faiths to attend a community prayer event at Yankee Stadium. A number of Christian speakers showed up. None of them mentioned Jesus. I guess they didn’t want to offend anyone. But without Jesus, Christianity is just another religion. Why would anyone want to have anything to do with it? I wouldn’t.

Well, actually one of the speakers did mention Jesus. His name was Dr. David Benke, a Lutheran pastor from New York City who also serves as president of the Atlantic District of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

Dr. Benke’s reward for doing the right thing–offering comfort and support to the grieving people around him who desperately needed it, and not just offering any comfort and support, but the very best comfort and support this world has ever had to offer in the form of the Gospel of Jesus Christ–was to be brought up on charges of unionism. Unionism is a fancy Christianese word that means watering down Christianity and making all religions look equal.

LCMS has been fighting amongst itself ever since. On one hand, you have evangelical-minded people like Dr. Benke and LCMS president Dr. Jerry Kieschnick who have dedicated their careers and their lives to reaching as many people as possible with the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ. On the other hand, you have so-called “Confessional” Lutherans who talk mostly about something called “doctrinal purity.”

“Doctrine” is Christianese that can be roughly translated into “what you believe.” Confessionals like to use a lot of Christianese language. I have no idea why. And to be honest, if I were to take what my evangelical-minded pastor believes, write it down, and put it in a hat along with what Confessionals like LCMS First Vice President Daniel Preus and LCMS Second Vice President Wallace Schultz believe, you and I wouldn’t know the difference.

Now, maybe evangelical-minded Lutherans are more lax about what they require someone to believe. If you’re right about John 3:16 and understand that what Jesus did is the only reason you can go to heaven (and for that matter, the only reason you have any value whatsoever), you’re going to heaven. And an evangelical-minded person is more interested in getting as many people as possible right about that point than about making sure a smaller number of people believe the right thing about everything.

Yes, we have different priorities.

But I don’t think confessional Lutheranism is about doctrinal purity. It’s more about control. These are the hymns you may sing. This is what your church service is going to look like on any given day. These are the topics you are going to preach about each Sunday for the next year.

Unfortunately, you cannot anticipate the needs of the people around you months and years in advance. Different people in different places at different times have different needs.

The greatest treasure of Lutheranism is not that great hymnal we have. You can tell because it doesn’t seem like anyone can agree which of our many hymnals is the great hymnal we have.

The greatest treasure of Lutheranism is the greatest treasure of Christianity: The teaching that God wanted to save you in order to spend eternity with you, so He did anything and everything it would take to make that happen, in the form of sending Jesus Christ to come show us how to live, then die for us and rise again. That resurrection, and the deeds we do once we start to believe in it, are our 100%, iron-clad, unshakable assurrance that we are going to heaven.

In Christianese, that’s salvation and grace.

After Sept. 11, that was the message the confused masses needed to hear. A few churches heard the call and ran with it. Others responded to it the way they respond to everything: With a confusing message only a committed, longtime Christian would understand.

But the committed, longtime Christian was the last person who needed that. Jesus did not come for the healthy.

One man dared to stand up and challenge the convention of being a doctor for the healthy. Dr. David Benke accepted the invitation and preached the gospel to all who would listen at Yankee Stadium. He is now standing trial in his denomination for that dastardly deed. LCMS has now been called the Taliban of American Christendom in the press. Is this what we want to be known for?

Our willingness to compromise the Gospel, our unwillingness to meet the needs of the unchurched, and our eagerness to throw bricks at one another are the reasons why Christianity in this country grew for a short while after Sept. 11, then dropped back to its previous levels. Meanwhile, Islam grew.

A large number of LCMS churches are doing special services today, in rememberance of the events of a year ago. Many of them promise to be beautiful services, with high liturgy and beautiful hymns. I won’t be going.

One LCMS church is hosting an inter-denominational prayer gathering, where large numbers of Christians with gather and, for a day, put their differences aside and pray for this country and for American Christendom.

There might be some non-believers there, wondering about what this Christianity thing is and what it means, and asking some really hard questions. I hope so, at least. I want to talk to them.

That church might be disciplined for allowing such an event to take place on its grounds. I might be disciplined for taking part in it.

If that happens, I’ll take comfort in 1 Peter 4:19, as I hope Dr. Benke and Dr. Kieschnick do:

So then, those who suffer according to God’s will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good.

Who was the most influential woman in your life?

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

My good friend Brad came to me with a question a couple of weeks ago: Who was the most influential woman in your life?
He wasn’t looking for my answer so much as he was looking for what I thought people’s answers would be. So I countered with a question: Married or single? He asked what difference that made. “Well, if you’re married, the right answer is your wife, whether it’s your mother or not,” I said. “And if you’re single, the right answer is your mother. Now the true answer could be something totally different.”

Brad laughed. I think he might have said I’ll be good at staying out of trouble with a wife someday, but I’m sure I’ll be very good at getting in trouble, or at least getting lots of dirty looks. Guys live for that.

Brad was looking to shoot another video together, with that as the theme. The pieces just didn’t come together this year so we had to shelve the project. But his question lingers on.

Who was the most influential woman in my life?

Certainly I learned more from my mom than anyone else. She taught me weird ways to remember how to spell tough words. Do you ever have trouble remembering how to spell “Wednesday?” It’s the day the Neses got married. wed-Nes-day. Got it? And how to remember the capital of Norway. Well, I knew Oslo was the capital of some Northern European country, but I couldn’t remember which. So she wrote “nOrway” on a slip of paper. I never lost the Oslo/Norway connection after that. (That’s probably not very impressive to my European readers, but Americans are notoriously bad at geography. I don’t know how many Americans know Norway is in Europe. Some Americans may not know what Europe is, for that matter.)

And yes, mom taught me how to tie my shoes and how to blow my nose and how to brush my teeth and lots of stuff like that. And when I didn’t understand girls (which was often… Who am I kidding? It is often) she was always there to listen.

But the question was who wasn’t that. It was: Who was the most influential woman in my life?

Well, there was this girl that I met right after college. I told her I loved her, she told me she loved me, she changed my life, and set me off in an unexpected and (mostly) better direction and…

AND she couldn’t hold a candle to my grandmother, my mom’s mom, so even though I was devastated at the time, in retrospect I’m really glad we broke up.

What can I say about Granny? She grew up in southern rural Missouri, in the Depression, one of about a dozen kids (my grandparents came from families of 12 and 13, and I can never keep straight which came from which, especially since both had siblings who didn’t live to adulthood). Now, she got in some trouble growing up, but I think that experience, along with having lived through the Depression, helped her learn how to do the right thing even when resources seemed limited. She moved to Kansas City during World War II and got a job at Pratt & Whitney, working on an assembly line making airplane engines. She married a Kansas Citian. On a truck driver’s salary, they managed to raise four kids.

I remember a lot of things about her. She always had time for her family. She never wanted anyone to make a big deal about anything she did. She really knew how to cook. She made the best quilts in the world. And before anyone starts complaining about her falling into female stereotypes, I’ll tell you this. She absolutely loved working in her yard, and one of the things that pained her the most was her deterriorating ability to take care of her yard as she got older. Besides, she built airplane engines! Have I ever done anything that manly? I’m doing well to change the spark plugs in my car.

But if I had to sum Granny’s life up in a sentence, I’d say this: When it came to doing more with less, she was one of the very best.

What am I known for? A book and a series of magazine articles about doing more with less.

So, who was the most influential woman in my life? I think it was Granny.

Granny died a little over six years ago. I miss her.

A lot.

I had a conversation with my mom a while back about my two grandmothers. Granny had nothing for most of her life. My other grandmother wasn’t like that. She was a successful doctor, a psychiatrist. She married a successful doctor. He was a general practitioner, and one of the best diagnosticians you’d ever see. I can say a lot about him, but I’ll say this and have my peace: His father spent a lot of time hanging out with tycoons, and must have learned a few things and passed them on to his son. The guy had money, but in a lot of ways he lived like my other grandmother, who had nothing. A good rule of thumb is that if you have money but live like you have none, you’ll end up with a lot more.

I’m talking a lot more about my dad’s father (he wasn’t a dad) than I am about his mother (she wasn’t a mom). Frankly I know more about him. I know she was brilliant. Yes, she was smarter than my mom’s mom. Granny didn’t always have all the answers. My other grandmother always had an answer. And it was usually right. It was also usually long. (I get that from somewhere.) I remember asking her once if Cooperstown, NY is close to New York City. It took her half an hour to answer that question.

But I never had much of a relationship with her. Neither did my dad. He’d talk about “my mother,” or “my father.” I heard him call his father “Dad” once. They were arguing. About me. As for her, well, I never heard him call her “Mom.”

I haven’t seen her or spoken with her since October 1990.

It’s hard for me to talk or write about this, because I don’t want to rag on my relatives. I always had a great deal of respect for them. I know what they were capable of, and I think that’s why I’m disappointed in them.

My dad grew up being told he’d be a failure all his life. He didn’t get good grades, and he was rebellious. I suspect a lot of that was because he had two absentee parents. But Dad was smart. It seems his biggest problem growing up was that he mostly used his great mind to figure out when he had to perform and when he could get by with slacking. He also couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted to do with his life. He had the same gifts his father had, but he wanted to be as different from his father as possible, and that posed a dilemma for him. He once told me his father didn’t know what to do with him. But that’s OK. Dad was only two years younger than I am now when he finally figured out what to do with himself.

The decision was made that my dad’s younger brother would carry my grandfather’s torch after he died. I don’t know what role she played in the decision, but she stood behind it. My dad watched as his brother made mistakes and both his brother and his mother paid for them. My dad tried to help. He didn’t want his help. She didn’t want his help. Finally my dad gave up. Dad had made himself a success; in his own mind, he’d proven them wrong. I don’t think he was interested in proving them wrong in their minds; he just didn’t want to see them struggle. Loyalty runs in the family.

I asked my mom which of my grandmothers really had more? Her mom thought she struggled all her life, but she was always able to provide for herself and others. Always. Had she been able to see that, I think she’d still be alive today.

When Granny died, she left enough for her four kids to fight over. But they didn’t fight over it. That wasn’t how she raised them.

I know one of my duties is to provide for my relatives, and in that regard, to be perfectly honest, I always let my dad’s mom down. But I guess I always assumed since she never wanted my dad’s help when he was alive, why would she want mine? To my knowledge, she never attempted to contact me after he died, so I had no way of knowing any different.

Dad’s mom died yesterday. All I have on her living conditions is hearsay, but I know poverty when I hear it described.

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