WHAT IN THE NAME OF GOD HAVE WE DONE IN THE NAME OF GOD

 

Shortly before my 19^th birthday in the autumn of 1959 I was working and living on North Delaware Street in Indianapolis, an area of stately old mansions which had seen slightly better days.  This was a short sojourn of about six weeks before I went into the Army.  The weather was a beautiful warm pre Indian summer that September.  Across the alley to the North, stood the old Jewish Temple which had been converted into a thriving Fundamentalist Church.  The building was classically beautiful, constructed of pure white Indiana limestone with an abundance of colored art glass.  The place was very active with many programs and always seemed to have a full house for every sermon.  There was an air of success permeating the entire operation when you could hear the preacher coming loud through the open windows.  It was almost enough to make me curious enough to enter and sit down.  But having an inherent suspicion of churches and clergymen in general, stemming partially from my contact with them already while working in a Funeral Home, I stayed on my side of the alley.  There was a red flag which I didn’t connect until years later, but both he and his wife drove brand new black Cadillac sedans.  That was the day when a Cadillac still meant something, and yes, I had mine in another decade.

I saw her, his wife, one day walking----waddling--- really down the alley.  She did not look like she did when she was portrayed in the documentaries made years later.  She was short and stout bordering on fat.  She had a beehive hairdo which every woman under 87 had that year.  Even with my inexperience with woman’s hair and the distance from her I knew it was dyed black.  I had never seen a preacher’s wife who dyed her hair but way beyond that there was an air of absolute evil over and around her.  That is the only way I can describe it.

I went into the army and took my basic training.  I returned in the spring of

1960.  I drove up Delaware Street and the whole place was gone!!  It was like empty.  I don’t remember if the sign was still there or not but otherwise the whole place looked as if it had been raptured.  No explanation.

It was not until, November 18 1978, 34 years ago, when I had occasion to thank God for keeping me out of his church.  When it hit the headlines and the National news big time; stories of a murdered congressman and 918 people dead after drinking Kool Aid laced with cyanide that the name Peoples Temple and Jim Jones clicked into place for me.

THE SHADOW SAYS; THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER HISTORY ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT!

WEED

Fortunately for a lot of people the High Sheriff was born before his time.  A few years after he was term limited out, vans painted psychedelic colors were spotted parked along rural roads in Bindweed County.  They were sporting Illinois plates and Chicago bumper stickers.  Long haired young people in tie died shirts and headbands sporting peace signs were seen picking weeds from roadside ditches and loading them into the back of the van.  The times, they were a changin’.

Early in World War II the Japanese captured the Philippine islands cutting off the major supply of Manila rope to the United States.  Rope, made from hemp, was needed for almost everything used to fight a war.  So, for the war effort, the government ironically urged farmers to grow hemp -- marijuana which had been made illegal only four years before.  In part due to a ridiculous propaganda movie Reefer Madness which later became a cult classic.

Well, we won the war, as much as you can win any war, and the patriotic farmers of Indiana went back to growing corn and soybeans, plowing under

their forgotten fields of marijuana.  Some of it remained along fence rows and in forgotten corners where it multiplied and thrived regarded as ditchweed and not as a cash crop.

It was not until many years later when I became more conversant with different forms of weed and the effects of smoke that I remembered and recognized the pungent unmistakable odor of our haymow in the barn on our farm in Soythistle Township in Bindweed County Indiana.

 THE SHADOW SAYS: BORDEN WASN’T THE ONLY ONE WHO HAD CONTENTED COWS.

A CRIME AGAINST NATURE

 I must have been on school the day the High Sheriff of Bindweed County   visited my mother but my little sister remembers vividly clinging to her skirts in fear as he harangued my mother over…..what?

Over the heinous crime of polluting the river?  Of what great import was it to the law and order of Bindweed County that we dumped the hot ashes from our wood stove into the Tippecanoe River?  Hot ashes were not a thing you wanted to have close to buildings especially on a windy day.  Beside that, everyone had been dumping everything into the Tippecanoe since the first white man sank up to his knees in its muddy banks.  And of all the people to accuse; MY MOTHER who wouldn’t even remove the tag that said: “DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW”.

It is well my father was gone that afternoon.  He would have stood up to the man, Sheriff or not.  As it was he just told my mother to wait a week or two and then resume business as usual.  The old man was pretty low key and I can’t remember him ever getting into a rage.

Sheriff Morris Morris, “Mo” to everyone in the county except for the increasing number who had had a run in with him, was on his third term as Sheriff of Bindweed County.  A local boy, he had returned from World War II a much decorated war hero where he had reputedly strangled a Japanese officer with his bare hands during the vicious island fighting in the effort to invade Japan.  The local citizens thought ‘What better man to enforce law and order in Bindweed and environs.  Mo had his own idea of “law and order according to Mo”.   A deeply religious man, he was a lay preacher in

‘The Church of the Revelation of the Risen Spirit’ where he had attended since his youth.  What fostered his absolute hatred of alcohol and those who drank it or were even suspect of drinking it, nobody knows.  As the Sheriff advanced toward middle age his temper grew more and more ungoverned.  He was known to simply go off on people and launch a tirade of verbal abuse.  On more than one occasion he roughed up men for little reason.

I suppose any man who, given a gun and almost absolute power over almost 400 square miles and the residents thereof along with the enthusiastic backing of the local newspaper, could confuse himself with the Deity.

And then there are some who think that to hassle a defenseless housewife with a small child is tantamount to being a bully.

THE SHADOW SAYS:  WHY DO YOU SAY WHITE MAN WHEN IT IS NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT TO SAY BLACK MAN OR RED MAN?

 Listen here, Shadow.  You are not indispensable to this blog!

I CAME UP ON A SMALL SUSTANANCE FARM ON THE SOUTH BANK OF THE TIPPECANOE RIVER---

---in Bindweed County, Indiana.  My parents worked hard, obeyed the law, paid their taxes, did without before they would buy on the black market, refused to join the Klan, stayed the Hell out of the way and got worked over by the system every time they turned around.  I came from a family who did not place a long distance telephone call unless it was to call the veterinarian or if someone had died.  They were a little bit behind in their payments and a little bit ahead of their times.  And when they died their names were misspelled in each of their obituaries.

 The farm I lived on as a child was little changed from the Civil War.  In my lifetime I

have bridged a gap from living almost in the 19^th Century to Outer Space.  The house was heated with wood stoves and was illuminated by the yellow glow of a kerosene lamp.  I did my farm chores by the light of a kerosene lantern.  My father, a cautious man, wanted to make sure electricity wasn’t a passing fad before wiring up the farm in 1948.  He farmed with horses until sickness forced him to sell them to an Amish farmer in 1944; the year of the fear.

But—I did not walk seven miles through the snow to school.  I was insured of attendance by the ever faithful school hack.  My parents knew if I walked to school I would never show up.

This was the times and place where I came up:

Before dawn on a late October morning a few years before I was born someone drove a 1933 Ford V8 through a T intersection and crossed the state road into a field just east of our house leaving muddy tire tracks.  It was Dillinger, it was rumored, on his way north to Chicago after relieving the Peru, Indiana police department of their arsenal.

   I attended Soythistle Township School and graduated after enduring twelve years of sanctioned bullying by both the older students and some of the teachers with only my mother keeping me there. Beyond that, I am self educated.  Three days after graduation I was on a bus out of there on my way to start my career as an Undertaker and to fall very much in love.  I was 17 and she was 22 and I had a deeply held dark secret.

But I digress.  That I will write about another time.  Maybe.

Why an Undertaker?  Because the Undertaker in Jimson City knew how to dress.  I mean, my old man was a pretty snappy dresser himself but this guy used to come out to social functions in Bloomingsburg and he had this Camel’s hair topcoat to die for.  Damn!  It was a pretty thing and I wanted one, so what better way…..  More importantly, the Undertaker from Jimson City didn’t have cowshit on his shoes. What was actually on the soles of his shoes, I didn’t find out until later.

THE SHADOW SAYS: MARLENE DIETRICH MY Kind of WOMEN-----Bear with me here, this is a bit of a leap. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=1d-qiTI1NYA

  
In Europe it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman - we make love with anyone we find attractive. / Marlene Dietrich

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=1d-qiTI1NYAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=1d-qiTI1NYA