Refreshments Were Served And A Good Time Was Had By All

New Year’s Eve at the Berghof 1939.

D.A.D.D.D.

One of my Christmas gifts to my sister was a kind of joke: two Dads Against Daughters Dating Democrats bumper stickers. (I had to buy two, as the vendor only sells the bumper sticker in pairs.)

My sister is a political conservative, and she has claimed, since she was a freshman in high school, that she could never marry a Democrat. I thought she might appreciate the sentiment expressed on the bumper sticker—which she very much did.

She immediately affixed one of the bumper stickers to a storage unit in her bedroom at home, and she intends to take the other bumper sticker back to Vanderbilt and mount it on her dorm wall.

Further, my sister asked me to send her six more D.A.D.D.D. bumper stickers after she returned to Nashville, because she wants to give them to four friends—and to two professors “who are greatly in need of something like this”.

I told her that the $9.95 I had spent on her two bumper stickers had exhausted my bumper sticker allowance for the year, and that she would have to spend her own money if she wanted more bumper stickers.

As Christina Claimed In Her Book . . .

Best Christmas Wishes

Just In Time For Christmas . . .

Edina’s Southdale Mall, America’s first multi-level, fully-enclosed, climate-controlled indoor shopping center, pictured in 1956, the year Southdale opened.

Local news sources reported today that the only remaining original Southdale tenant, a three-generation family business operating at Southdale for 55 years, was being forced out of the mall. Its final day at Southdale will be Christmas Eve.

Belief

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph.

Shirley Temple

The Arrest Of The Flensburg Government

23 May 1945, Flensburg (in North Germany): British forces arrest the key figures of the immediate post-Hitler German state, the so-called “Flensburg Government”—General Alfred Jodl, Albert Speer and Admiral Karl Dönitz—and escort them into captivity. The three highest-ranking German officials became, from the morning of their arrests, Prisoners Of War.

Jodl (whose widow Andrew’s father met and befriended in the early 1970s) was sentenced to death at Nuremburg. Speer, in an act of staged contrition, managed to escape the hangman’s noose, and was given twenty years. Dönitz, largely because American Admiral Chester Nimitz came to his aid (by submitting an Affidavit noting that German naval warfare in the Atlantic had been little different than American naval warfare in the Pacific), got off with ten years.

German Refugees Heading West In April 1945

German refugees heading West in early April 1945, looking to escape the brutal atrocities of The Red Army as the Russians raped and pillaged their way toward Berlin.

It was the final four weeks of the war in Europe.

The Brandenburg Gate May 1945

A Couple Of Academic Standouts

University Of Iowa Men’s Basketball players Bryce Cartwright, from Compton, California, and Melsahn Basabe, from Brooklyn, New York, both of whom are expected to be declared academically ineligible shortly after the first of the year and, as a result, unable to compete in intercollegiate athletics.

One would never be able to guess, from the photograph alone, that these individuals are not cut out for academic achievement. Seldom have I seen two more dedicated, clean-cut, scholarly-looking student-athletes.

And, for the record, I vigorously denounce the many comments on Iowa sports message boards suggesting that these two players have well-known substance-abuse problems and are routinely referred to throughout Iowa City and environs as “those two potheads”.

After all, everyone knows that the University Of Iowa Athletic Department does NOT tolerate drug use and that the Iowa Athletic Department’s drug-testing program is pure as the driven snow.