My Rants Du Jour have been written daily for six months, and this is one written while I was living in Clearwater, Florida, before returning home in Baton Rouge. I think it was written around December 1, 2004.
Friends and Kin:
The wind is up this morning in Clearwater
. The palms and live oaks are whipping around in the breezes that can’t seem to make up their minds which way to blow. That is one thing I love about being here, the wind, as there is always movement in the leaves and you feel little zephyrs on your face and remember that just a mile to the west is the Gulf of Mexico
and twenty miles or so to the East is Tampa
Bay
. Pinellas County is like a little appendix peninsula surrounded by water standing out on the west coast of Florida, which is a big appendix on the Southeast of the continent. And there’s a bit of a nip in the wind today for the first time this year. Change. I love it. Never having lived where seasons are pronounced, changes, even slight dips in temperature like this are welcome and I feel like shaking my fur all about like a dog waking from sleep, stretching and then going out to smell something.
I will be returning to Baton Rouge
this week. My mortgage
/insurance/securities company (Equity Leadership Group) should be licensed by the Office of Financial Institutions this week---finally (The company is already in thirty three states) and I can get busy setting my office there with an aim to getting an branch in every city in Louisiana
within a year or so. When you ask someone what they would think about having a 1.25% mortgage
they stop dead in their tracks and look at you like you are crazy. When you explain how it can be done, also telling how smart it is to carry a big long mortgage
rather than paying off their house they always are very still for a moment as all the machinery in their head readjusts and they go, “wow, nobody ever told me that.” I did the same thing when it hit me. Ric Edelman, Financial Planner of national renown, has a book “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Wealth,” showing 8 secrets of how 5,000 ordinary Americans became successful investors, and the number one secret is that they, one for one, carry a mortgage
on their homes even though they could afford to pay it off. I have a tape of one of his presentations on why you should carry a big long mortgage
, and literally everyone I have shown it to has an immediate transformation of viewpoint They realize how the banks in this country have taken advantage of the homeowner since FDR by putting the interest on the loan up front, evidently knowing that the average homeowner keeps a mortgage
for an average of 4.3 years. They refinance, and never pay it off though that was the dream of their grandparents and parents in their day, and in refinancing they pay only interest. Appreciation, not principal accumulation, is what gives the value. So why let the bank use your money to invest for themselves? OK, enough preaching. I am on a crusade because this revelation showed me why Americans, with easy credit and credit cards, have gotten into such a mess financially. Showing them this program reveals how people can use their mortgage
to provide a financial plan to help survive the time when social security comes to an end.
It's the birthday of writer and historian Will Durant, (books by this author) born in North Adams
,
Massachusetts
(1885). He's best known for a huge, eleven-volume work called The Story of Civilization (1939-1975). In the book, which he wrote with his wife Ariel, he attempts to synthesize nearly all of human history, following artistic, scientific, religious, and political movements. It was an effort to create a world history for the ordinary person. Though the book was heavily criticized for being incomplete, it was important to many people who wanted to read and enjoy history.
I must have been reading the future, talking about Will Durant. I see the snide little criticism about his work, and consider such the barking of little cur dogs barking at the wheels of a huge fire engine. I think every great man (in this case man and woman for Ariel must have been a fabulous mate for Will) has plenty of those little cur dogs, and a sign of his greatness is the ability to ignore and keep creating. I think there are eleven huge volumes in all in the history series, beginning with prehistory and ending at the industrial revolution. I got them thirty years ago free for joining Book Of The Month Club. It was the only reason I joined. Then I came upon a couple of others, “Heroes of History,” “Lessons of History,” which are very brief little digests of men and women in history and times in history, which give must fodder for thought. So what if it is incomplete? I wonder what they mean. History is written by the winner of the battles and who came out on top, regardless of what really happened. When Susan and Russell Salamon reviewed my novel, Command Influence, Susan said, when I had included a word for word dialogue between Ted Ponfil and a couple of lawyers in the JAG Office at the fictional Fort Lucky, “it may have been that way, but don’t put it in.” I had a discussion between Ponfil, who was Jewish and proud from Cincinnati
, about to get out of the Army and was a “short timer,” and no longer worried about having to kiss ass and said what he thought---and had gone through a long explanation of the difference between a schmuck and a schlemiel. So I abbreviated it, and it came out better. So even if it happened a certain way, history is what somebody says that happened. And that is what history is.
It's the birthday of the "King of the Cowboys," Roy Rogers, born Leonard Franklin Slye in Cincinnati
,
Ohio
(1911). When he was eighteen he moved with his mother and father to California
, where he earned money by harvesting fruit and working as a cowhand. He started playing guitar and singing in small theaters and on the radio in the 1930s. He met Bob Nolan and Tim Spenser, and they started the band "Sons of the Pioneers." The band made appearances in several motion pictures. Rogers
's first screen name was "Dick Weston." He changed it to Roy Rogers just before he got his first big break, replacing Gene Autry in the movie Under Western Stars (1938). The movie was a hit, and it launched Rogers
's steady film career as a singing cowboy.
Oh Boy. The singing cowboys. We had this discussion a while back about Roy and Gene, the movie icons of my boyhood. Today they are corny and even funny today, but they were serious business when I was a kid. My little village of Castor, somewhere up in the north west central part of Louisiana, about fifty miles south of Shreveport, consisted of six stores, two service stations, post office, café, barber shop, my daddy’s store in which my granddaddy had his tiny dentist office, at a crossroads which along the north south road ran the Louisiana and Arkansas railroad. Two passenger trains passed through daily and two or three freights rumbled right on by, all blanketing the little town in an acrid cloud of coal smoke. My god, those wonderful trains. Out of the stillness came those great metal monsters, shaking the earth, screeching whistle, clicking and clacking, crying metal on metal, shambling at high speed right through the little towns. (I wrote a short story that has been published called “My Southern Belle,” and if anyone wants a copy I will send it---about a teen age kid standing alongside the track in the moonlight as the great Southern Belle freight passes an arm length from him). As a matter of fact, I will include it as a separate Rant today. (It can be found on www.thedeadmule.com)
The reason I started writing about Castor, is that in about 1946, just after the war, I was eleven. I had a good friend, Buck Bogan. A traveling show came into town and set up a tent in the little vacant lot right between the café and the barber shop. There were bleacher type seats, a wobbly, wrinkled old dirty screen and a projector that showed black and white movies. The barber, Syme Cloud, was always up something, told me to tell the man who ran the show that I should get in free, because my daddy was the mayor, and Buck should, as he was my friend, accompany me as my guest free of charge as well. This started a wrangle between me at eleven, and the carny type guy who ran the show. It cost a dime, I think, but that was a lots of money. We went round and round, and once the battle was pitched there was no relenting or backing out n my part, and Buck stood by me as my sidekick, both insisting on our rights as the reigning political forces of Castor. I think, after it turned into a fiasco, the ratty old guy let us see the movie free. We sat on the bleachers, our legs hanging over and not touching the ground, and saw a singing cowboy movie on the flickering screen on that summer afternoon. Meanwhile Syme, as he was want to do after starting trouble like that , sat back and laughed. There was little to do in Castor, so Syme always loved a good time like that. Syme alone is the subject of a good short story. So were most of the characters of that little town. I imagine, living in a little town, you get to know all of the people and there are plenty characters. City living never gives this opportunity. The city blends them and you can’t take a look and get to know one, for there are too many of them.
OK, that’s way too much of a Friday rant.
Have a great day, you all.
ldsledge
