Jackie Robinson and the Georgia town that forgot him!

Jackie Robinson was born in the little Georgia town of Cairo, but you’d barely know it.
by Charlie Leck

Calling all who can remember the great Jackie Robinson
Yes, this is a call to arms! You’ll probably need to be 65 years of age or more, but I’m still calling you to rise up and proclaim your memories of Jackie Robinson and wonder with my why the small town in which he was born hasn’t paid him the kind of honors it should. Then, let’s join together to call on Cairo to create some kind of major institution in its town to rightfully honor this historic member of the Major League baseball fraternity.

What’s behind all of this? Well here’s what happened on a visit I paid to the little town in Georgia last year!

Let me pin-point Cairo on a map for you! It’s very nearby Thomasville, Georgia, which, in turn, is very nearby Tallahassee, Florida. Cairo is less than forty miles almost due north of Tallahassee (about 20 miles north of Florida’s northern border). It’s nice country and it has beautiful roads that virtually glide through the beautiful Georgia pines, inviting you to push your car quite handily along.

Last March, I was due to visit a friend in Thomasville – an old (if I may use the word about a lady) high school friend. I was running earlier for my appointed time of arrival, so, knowing that a boyhood hero of mine, Jackie Robinson, was from nearby Cairo, I thought I’d take a drive to find, perhaps, the Jackie Robinson Museum or the Jackie Robinson Community Center, or the Jackie Robinson Sports Center. Certainly, I’d find the Jackie Robinson Memorabilia and Gift Shop.

No such luck. I found none of the above! I drove slowly around the community, up and down the little streets and avenues. Main Street was not named after Jackie. Neither was the local high school. The community center bore some insignificant name. I did find a small sign on the high school baseball field, proclaiming it to be Jackie Robinson Field. I’ve only recently found out there is also a small bronze marker behind home plate on that field that outlines Jackie’s illustrious baseball career.

After driving around quite awhile, I headed out on a road that was called, on one sign I saw, Jackie Robinson Memorial Highway. Out there I found a small piece of property where a bronze highway marker proclaims the site to be the birthplace of Jackie Robinson. A chimney still stood there. It was all that remains of the little house where Jackie was born.

Well, here’s what I thought as I climbed back in my car and drove over toward my friend’s house in Thomasville: “What a bunch of dumb bunnies they must have in this town! No Jackie Robinson museum? No Jackie Robinson center? No Jackie Robinson gift store?”

Over lunch that day, in Cairo, I told my friend how disappointed I was and how I thought the little town was missing out on the wonderful possibility of honoring Jackie and bringing lots of visitors to Cairo. They certainly ought to appeal to Major League Baseball to help them open up a Jackie Robinson Center there in their small town.

Well, what do you know?
Just a few days ago, a little note and a newspaper clipping came from my Thomasville friend. “Spotted this,” she wrote, “as I was skimming through the local Cairo paper the other day. Thought you might be interested to know that maybe someone will honor our local hero!!”

The news story was headlined: “Dr. Walden honored for service!”

I read about a local, Cairo doctor who received the 2012 community service award from the Georgia Academy of Family Physicians.” What the story also told me was that this doctor was also a die-hard Jackie Robinson fan. Her name is Linda I. Walden, MD, and she wonders, too, why Cairo has so little honored good-old Jackie. Hooray!

I also found a 2011 story about Doctor Walden in the Jacksonville Times. It points out that she is responsible for most of the historic indicators that stand today, pointing out that Cairo is the home of Jackie Robinson – the marker out at his birth site, the highway named after him and the sign at the high school baseball field. The doctor wants more. Over the years she’s faced plenty of opposition to her efforts and she hasn’t been afraid to label a lot of it what it was – racism! If Jackie Robinson had been a white man there would be no stopping the announcement of it in a town like this. Robinson may be one of the dozen most prominent names in Major League baseball history, for heaven’s sake! The doctor talks of personal threats on her. She’s certain that they were racially oriented.

The doctor has suggested the town put up statue honoring the great ballplayer in front of the county courthouse or the downtown library. The same commission that turned that idea down later approved a memorial for the Sons of the Confederacy.

Doctor Walden argues that the town and county would get an economic boost if it were better known as Robinson’s hometown.

Robinson did return to Cairo in 1949. He brought teammates Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe with him and they participated in a parade. The newspaper adds that the event was mostly attended by blacks.

The doctor is a third cousin of Jackie Robinson and it’s a mission for her to keep the memory of Jackie and all his wonderful accomplishment alive in the history of Cairo. She wants him to be known as more than a great ballplayer. She thinks Jackie was also a civil rights hero. He had to endure a lot as the first black player in a white man’s game. People threatened to boycott the game. The famous owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers stood tall and said: “Let ‘em boycott!” Jackie’s life was threatened many times. And when he finished playing the game, he still stood tall for civil rights and his willingness to stand up for the rights of black people was important because of the power his name carried.

Doctor Walden reminds us that Robinson, a commissioned Army officer was discharged from the service for once refusing to move to the back of a bus – and that was two decades before Rosa Parks took her famous seat on the front of the bus and refused to move. When he retired from baseball, he became as special assistant to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Jackie also opened and managed the first black owned bank in the United States.

For the record, Jackie Robinson was born on January 31, 1919, to sharecroppers on a plantation in Cairo. His grandparents were former slaves.

Well, I sat right down and penned a note to Doctor Walden. “Hey doc,” I said, “I agree with you and let’s get something going!” Or, at least, I wrote something to that effect. If I get a reply, I'll tell you about it.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Love Poem

            The Monarch

I see this poem as a love poem. You, perhaps, will see it as something else. Yet, both of us, I’m sure, will see it as beautiful and breathtaking!

by Charlie Leck

Kurt Vonnegut, the famous American author – one of the popular novelists of the latter part of the twentieth century led me to this incredible poem by Galway Kinnell. Of it Vonnegut wrote, to Kinnell: “At the age of 75, I had come to doubt that any words written in the present could make me like being alive a lot. I was mistaken. Your great poem… restored my soul. Jesus! What language! What a poet! What a world!”

I can not say more than that or anything better than that, so I won’t try.

Why Regret?
by Galway Kinnell

Didn't you like the way the ants help

the peony globes open by eating the glue off?

Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers

sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,

in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe

baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?

Wasn't it a revelation to waggle

from the estuary all the way up the river,

the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,

the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?

Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice

clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old

Webster's New International, perhaps having just

eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?

What did you imagine lies in wait anyway

at the end of a world whose sub-substance

is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?

Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren

and how little flesh is needed to make a song.

Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph

split open and the mayfly struggled free

and flew and perched and then its own back

broke open and the imago, the true adult,

somersaulted out and took flight, seeking

the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,

alimentary canal come to a stop,

a day or hour left to find the desired one?

Or when Casanova took up the platter

of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff

out the window, telling his startled companion,

"The perfected lover does not eat."

As a child, didn't you find it calming to imagine

pinworms as some kind of tiny batons

giving cadence to the squeezes and releases

around the downward march of debris?

Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs

what seemed your own inner blazonry

flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?

Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy

hinged beings, and then their offspring,

and then their offspring's offspring, could

navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,

to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,

by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors

who fell in this same migration a year ago?

Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert

to wake in the night and find ourselves

holding hands in our sleep?

Oh my!

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Manipulating Photographs

     I sharpened this illustration slightly in Photoshop!                                                                                       C. Leck

“Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop!”
by Charlie Leck

A gift came for me from daughter Cynthia. It’s a lovely book she bought for me at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where she had attended an exhibit called: Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop. The book sent bears the same title and is a wonderful discussion about how the great photography masters of the early twentieth century used the tools of the dark room to skillfully adjust and manipulate photographs for production – far different, in the end, than the photograph that the camera originally took.

The book was written and assembled by Mia Fineman, who is the Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan. The exhibit was sponsored by Adobe Corporation, the creator and owner of Adobe Photoshop. The book includes an interesting statement by Maria Yap, the senior Director in Adobe’s Digital Imaging Department. In part, it says this…

“As the proud corporate sponsor of “Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop,” Adobe has a special interest in the show’s thesis. For more than twenty years – since its first release in 1990 – Adobe Photoshop software has been accused of undermining photographic truthfulness. The implicit assumption has been that photographs shot before 1990 captured the unvarnished truth and that the manipulations made possible by Photoshop compromised that truth.

“Now, “Faking It” punctures this assumption, presenting two hundred works that demonstrate the many ways photographs have been manipulated since the early days of the medium to serve artistry, novelty, politics, news, advertising, fashion, and other photographic purposes…”

At a wonderful course I took last year at the Minneapolis Center for Photography, the instructor, Steve Bie, showed us an example of the way the American master of photography, Ansel Adams, would work in the dark room to greatly enhance a photograph that his camera took. This kind of touching up and altering of photographs has been going on for a long, long time.

In this book that my daughter sent me, another example of the way Ansel Adams worked a photograph is illustrated by using his very famous work “Moonrise.” The original is a fine photograph. The final, printed version, as enhanced by burning and dodging, among other things, is an extraordinary work of art. This paragraph explaining Adam’s attitude and his method in quite instructive…

“Ansel Adams, another renowned proponent of straight photography as well as an accomplished musician, often compared photography to music: ‘The negative is like a musical score,’ he said; ‘the making of the print is the performance.’ Nowhere is the virtuoso musicianship of straight photography more apparent than in Adams’ iconic image Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. He took the photograph of a nearly full moon rising over the village of Hernandez on a late-fall afternoon in 1941, just as the sun dipped behind the mountains, its dying rays illuminating the little white crosses in the village cemetery. In his rush to capture the fleeting moment, Adams had time to make only a single photograph. With no light meter handy, he based the exposure time on some quick mental calculations, and the resulting large-format negative was less than perfect, with a severely underexposed foreground and an overexposed sky. For several years, Adams struggled to deliver a great performance of this flawed score, expertly burning and dodging prints to darken the sky and increase the contrast in the town below; in 1948 he even altered the negative itself by chemically intensifying the foreground.”

The final version of the photograph, after Adams spent hours and hours on it, is stunning, remarkable and beautiful.

Is it phony? No, it is much more like what the eye of Ansel Adams saw and what he very much wanted his camera to capture.

“This Moonrise – the version that has been reproduced on countless posters and Sierra Club calendars – is a skillfully crafted artifact, an artist’s dramatic interpretation of a lackluster negative. This moonrise may resemble what Adams saw – or imagined he saw – when he stopped his car on the shoulder of a New Mexico highway in 1941, but it is certainly not a ‘straight’ rendition of the image recorded by the mechanical eye of the camera.”

The exhibit at the Metropolitan showed-off photographs that had been altered and manipulated for reasons of art, comedy, advertising or just plain fun.

Certainly, the entire process is made easier today by the invention of Photoshop, but it would be wrong to say that the invention allows us to do something today that couldn’t be done before. Perhaps it allows us to do these things more conveniently and quickly – and even more precisely – but photographic manipulation has been part of the art for a long, long time. It has been especially going on in portrait photography for a hundred years or more.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest is a novel by David Foster Wallace
by Charlie Leck

This is not a review; for I’m only 150 pages into this book. This is more an alert and a call to arms.

Have any of you read this book? If you have, are you as amazed as I am by it? Do you share my high opinion of it? Do you like the writing?

I’ve never quite posted a blog like this before, but I am so amazed by this big, big novel that I just have to wonder who all is reading it and what they are thinking.

I mean, this is a crazy book. If it weren’t so compelling and the story so mysteriously interesting, why you’d just shove it aside as a waste of time. And by mysteriously interesting, I mean that one cannot even figure out why it is so interesting as it is. A little of it is quoted below...

“In this dream, which every now and then still recurs, I am standing publicly at the baseline of a gargantuan tennis court. I’m in a competitive match, clearly: there are spectators, officials. The court is about the size of a football field, though, maybe, it seems. It’s hard to tell. But mainly the court’s complex. The lines that bound and define play are on this court as complex and convolved as a sculpture of string. There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net. I stand there tentatively. The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It’s simply huge. And it’s public. A silent crowd resolves itself at what may be the court’s periphery, dressed in summer’s citrus colors, motionless and highly attentive. A battalion of linesmen stand blandly alert in their blazers and safari hats, hands folded over their slacks’ flies. High overhead, near what might be a net-post, the umpire, blue-blazered, wired for amplification in his tall high-chair, whispers Play. The crowd is a tableau, motionless and attentive. I twirl my stick in my hand and bounce a fresh yellow ball and try to figure out where in all that mess of lines I’m supposed to direct service. I can make out in the stands stage-left the white sun-umbrella of the Moms; her height raises the white umbrella above her neighbors; she sits in her small circle of shadow, hair white and legs crossed and a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support.

“The umpire whispers Please Play.

“We sort of play. But it’s all hypothetical, somehow. Even the ‘we’ is theory: I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game.”
                                   [from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace]

There is something wild at work here – somewhat James Joyce, but more fun – J.D. Salinger, but even crazier – Elliot Rosewater, but even more complex.

In my daily journal, I wrote the other day…

Oh, my goodness, it is unusual and quite hysterical. And, I close it down after each segment’s reading with a number of questions and exclamations about its contents and what it has said to me or the greater world. Something about it compels me to return to another segment at another time and to another and to another. (The style and mystery of the book’s language is quite contagious!)

I am captivated by this book and I find myself absorbed in it while I’m reading. It is so intense in both humor and sobriety that I must occasionally pull myself away to rest. In two days, I have gotten through about 150 pages and felt moved, because I like it so much and would not ever (emphasis intended) have purchased it for myself (and that would have been a shame)

Who out there has read this book? Will you explain it to me.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Obama is NOT a Big Spender

When we take a close look at facts and figures, we find out the biggest spending President in recent decades was George W. Bush! The stock market soured under Bush and has revived under President Obama.

by Charlie Leck

That’s a factoid, folks. President Barack Obama has actually reduced spending since he took office. Take a look at the way Ezra Klein lays it out on WonkBlog. Mind you, we’re looking at per capita expenditures.

During Bill Clinton’s eight years in the White House, spending rose very moderately. Under George W. Bush , spending rocketed up (you have the expenditures of two wars to account for in those years). Under President Barack Obama expenditures actually decreased.

Now, to be honest, one has to admit that President Obama would have spent a helluva lot more money if he had been allowed to – and, if so, he probably would have brought the job crisis to an end much more quickly.

Republicans (especially the Tea Party types) don’t want to look at these numbers. Well, here are some more numbers for the negative Bachmannites and Tim Phillips, the head of Americans for Prosperity to look at: (headline) Stocks Roll Toward a Complete Recovery.

Standard & Poors 500, a favorite stock indicator, closed on Friday at 1,502.96 and that was the highest mark since 2007. Check out the news on housing and jobs.

And then remind yourself, because you probably need it like most Americans do, President Obama was not in the White House when this economy soured in 2007 and 2008. A few months after President Obama took the oath his first time, the market began slowly and earnestly to improve. Over the next few business days, there is probably going to be a very common market correction and a period of profit taking, when stock holders will do some selling. It’s not to be feared and most of the top analysts are projecting a strong market through the next two quarters.

I am no financial wizard and I’m not writing this blog as one. I’m a political observer and only a dabbler in the stock market. As such, I sense growing confidence over President Obama’s leadership. If even a small fraction of the Republican Party rallies around him, we could see our economy stretch its legs again and really get this nation going.

Also take note that a Minnesotan, Denis McDonough, from Stillwater, has taken the reins as Chief of Staff to President Obama. More reason for national confidence. McDonough is highly regarded in his home state and much admired. If you never hear anything about his work in the White House that means he’s doing his job well.

A news report into today’s Washington Post on national polling after the inauguration show that a very large percentage of the population agrees with Obama on the topics he ticked off in his inaugural address – gay rights, available and affordable medical care, tighter gun control et al. This really is a middle ground president as much as the far right wants to make him sound like a left winger.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Behind the Inaugural Address

President Obama’s second inaugural address was carefully thought-out and there was a strategy behind it. This is a President who wants the people to win and he spoke up for them.
by Charlie Leck

I have spent a lot of time – an exorbitant amount – thinking about Monday’s inaugural address by President Obama. I have tried to take seriously the criticism of the speech by the more conservative politicians and columnists. In the end, I have decided that it was a nearly brilliant speech, carefully planned and, from a political perspective, nearly ingenious.

President Obama, in the speech, was doing what he should have done four years ago. He is calling his army of followers to action. He gathered around him a very active, vocal majority in this election and he won decisively. Now, he is calling the Obama army to his side, to help him win the legislative battle with Congress.

If you want to understand the genius behind the speech, here are two national columns about that subject that you should read. They say precisely what I have been thinking and they say it better than I possibly could on my own. If this question – about the strategy of the speech – interests you, then you should read these two columns.

Read first, The Obama Majority by Harold Meyerson (I endorse this column as exactly right on!)

Then read E.J. Dionne Jr.’s remarkable column, Obama’s Unapologetic Inaugural Address.

I think you will then understand why Obama made the speech he did. You don’t need to agree with the strategy, but you will see that that strategy was well thought out (in other words, Obama knew what he was doing). I happen to think Obama is doing the right thing in calling his army of followers to his side for the battle with Congress.

Kenneth Baer, a director of the Harbour Group and a former Obama staffer, argues forcefully that President Obama has placed himself in the direct mainstream of American politics as it is today – that this was not a speech from the left but directly out of the new center. It may well be that the average American has finally awakened to the weirdness of the Tea Party and the failures of conservatism – the very same conservatism that gave us wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a crumbled economy (remember the housing bubble and the bank crashes of 2008 that Obama had to deal with when he was inaugurated in 2009).

If you’d like to read the other side of the question, here’s an opinion piece by Stephen B. Young that argues that it was a very divisive inaugural address and one not good for the nation.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

The First Lady is First among First Ladies

I’m completely dazzled by the First Lady. I admire no one in America more than her. And, I’ve got this hopeless, old man’s crush on her!
by Charlie Leck

I don’t think I need to tell my regular readers, that no one should expect an unbiased or neutral expression of opinion out of me today – the day after the Inauguration of President Obama. If you do, forget it!

Here’s the simple truth about the inauguration from my perspective. Whenever I see the First Lady, Michelle Obama, all duded out, why, I’m like melted butter. I’m reduced to big alligator tears. My goodness, I love the woman! I’m crazy about her! She owns me completely.

What a grand woman and mother she seem to be! I gotta believe it! Look at her. She’s solid as a rock and so loving to her children and supportive of her man. Have you ever seen her looking flustered? My gracious, the woman is composed and totally stable.

And, is she bright or what? I watched all the activities yesterday and last evening just to catch little glimpses of Mrs. Obama. I didn’t care which dress, by which designer, she came out in last night at the inaugural balls. I knew she’d look spectacular whatever she wore.

How can a woman be so solid? It’s a foolish question! I’ve been around too many solid and spectacular women. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that she is a person who never loses it – that composure and rock-solid mind. Of course, she’s like real human beings and I know there are the moments when she gets exasperated – when she has to let a little anger out and when she can’t help but show her frustrations. I wouldn’t be able to admire her so much if I didn’t know she’s one-hundred percent a human being just like the rest of us.

So, yes, I cannot be impartial about President Obama. I wish he had a more cooperative Congress. If he did, we’d see tremendous advancements in human rights. And, we’d see solid tax reform that would allow us to pay our past and present bills. Obama knows that the way out of our financial troubles is to heat America up and get it rolling again – get all able Americans working again and education doing what it should do.

Obama is a dreamer, yes! Thank goodness! I want to be led by a dreamer with a grand and glowing vision for America. This president has got just that. And, he’s got a gorgeous wife who supports him as solidly as we could ever imagine. And, I’m betting that she is also his most trusted adviser.

Did you get some good looks at her yesterday? Man, what a woman!

________________

P.S. Watching so much of the inaugural festivities yesterday introduced me to a host of spectacular people I didn’t know very much about; and I was really, really impressed. I came away from the day feeling very positive about America. We’ve got some awfully wonderful people in this nation and we’re going to be in good hands for a long, long time – especially if we can shake the immense negativism of the Tea Party movement. I'll mention just a few of these extraordinaries...

1. Richard Blanco, Inaugural Poet: He's not a great poet (yet) but he has a big and open heart filled with love and understanding. He was right-on, yesterday and his words were important for us to hear: "One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores, peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces of the great lakes, spreading a simple truth across the great plains, and charging across the Rockies....)
   
   You can find full text of the poem and see a video of his reading here...
2. Brendon Ayanbadejo, Baltimore Ravens linebacker, who championed the right for gay couples to marry in the Maryland election this past autumn. I listened to a long interview of this young man and I was deeply impressed by his steady composure and his sympathetic understanding for people who are treated unjustly. This is one guy you are going to hear plenty about outside of football.
3. Alicia Keys, entertainer and singer who did a special rendition of one of her songs: Obama's on Fire! "He's the President and he's on fire!" Ms. Keys is an impressive singer, but she's also a very mature woman and thinker who will be a leader in the move to better our nation. I listened to a couple of interviews of her and I'm proud that she's a fellow-American.
4. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor swore in Vice President Joe Biden and smiled widely and happily as she did. Ms. Sotomayor is an amazing story of American success -- evidence that it can still be done in this great nation. I heard her interviewed twice during the day and she absolutely demonstrated in clear tones her impressive intelligence and her extraordinary compassion. San Diego Mayor, Julian Castro, like Ms. Sotomayor, a Latino, was also very impressive in the numerous interviews of him. Here's an interesting and uplifting story from the Huffington Post about the many extraordinary Latino citizens who impressed over the weekend.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.