The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

Don’t those Republican candidates for President have bigger issues to consider than one man’s religion? Oh, I understand the candidate who raised the issue is hiding behind the coattails of a fundamentalist preacher, but in my opinion, he isn’t showing much courage of either supporting the attack on a fellow candidate or denouncing the preacher’s stance.

I thought all this was behind us when John F. Kennedy overcame the Catholic stigma and proved that a man was elected President, not a religion. But here it is raising its ugly head again.

I was once baptized a Mormon. Before you get your knickers in a twist, there is a story behind that description. As a special assignments reporter for a Los Angeles newspaper, I was assigned to follow the migrant farm workers through a season of harvest. You may call them fruit tramps and other names, but believe me they are salt of the earth nomads who move from one harvest to another in search of work. If you look down on them, stop eating.

Assigned with me was Bob Shumway, a photographer. Bob was a Mormon. We met up with the first group of migrants in the fertile valleys of central California. They were camped out in great numbers. When the sun went down, there was a bone chilling wind whipping through the valley. Bob was roaming from campfire to campfire capturing the images of what it is like to be a nomad in wealthy America.

I finally caught up with Bob talking to one of the migrants. As soon as I walked up, the man offered me a cup of coffee. Before I could answer, Bob interrupted by saying:

“No, no, he is Mormon too.”

I was puzzled because I really wanted that cup of coffee to stave off the chill of night. As we moved on, Bob explained that he had just saved me from dysentery or worse, because my host had just spit in the cup and wiped it off with a soiled handkerchief. I went away saying a few Hail Marys for my emergency conversion.

With all the problems facing this nation the question in my mind is why are we wasting time pointing fingers. Why not, instead, adopt the best of each religion – including Islam – into our own religious thinking. I can think of many attributes of the Church of Latter Day Saints, that would be as asset. Or, the Seventh Day Adventist who are the most giving people I know. The Jehovah Witnesses, who are so committed they are willing to go door to door with their message.

I remember Les Rodney, the religion editor for the newspaper I worked for in California, who was Jewish by religious persuasion, covering and writing about a Methodist convention. Several of the Methodist ladies visited him in the newspaper office to thank him for his coverage. One of the women said to him: “Mr. Rodney we just know you must be a Methodist because of the sincerity of your writing,” to which Rodney replied: “There is a little Methodist in all of us.” Solomon could not have said it better.

There should be a little Presbyterian, Baptist, Lutheran, Episcopalian and any branch of the Christian faith in each of us, along with Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism. Scratch the surface and you will discover all say: Love your neighbor.

Rather than using a man’s personal religion as political fodder, the candidate would be better off to tell the voters how he will solve the mess both political parties have created in Washington and get out from behind anyone who professes love their neighbor but doesn’t practice what he preaches.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

In this era of everything on instant demand, little wonder that one of America’s icons has disappeared from our roadside. I speak, of course, about the famous Burma Shave signs that once entertained us with rhymed philosophy as we drove the byways.

Obviously, no one today is driving slow enough to read the signs, a string of one sentence posted at internals to give a subtle message – yet one of great importance.

Here are some samples:
A man who drives

while he is drunk

should haul his coffin

in his trunk.

-Burma Shave
Each message was signed “-Burma Shave,” but there was no other advertising.

Don’t loose your head

to save a minute

you need your head

because your brains are in it.

Around the curve

lickety split

it was a beautiful car

wasn’t it?

Don’t stick your elbow

out to far

it might ride home

in another car.

Passing cars

where you can’t see

may get you

a glimpse of eternity

Drove too long

driver snoozing

what happened next

is not amusing.

Had instructions

to drive carefully

to protect our little

tax deductions.

These once subtle messages to slow down and smell the roses have gone the way of the milkman, laundryman and the iceman and only the memory of them remains in those of use old enough to have seen them along the roadway of life.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

I don’t pretend to understand the logic of those who say the President and the military violated the Constitutional rights of due process by hunting down and killing Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.

Critics like Republican Senator Ron Paul contend that al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen from New Mexico, should have been arrested and brought to trial.

Easy for a politician seeking the presidency to say. Obviously, not all Republicans shared Paul’s views:

Rep. Peter King, R-New York, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the lethal strike was lawful. “It was entirely legal. If a citizen takes up arms against his own country, he becomes an enemy of the country. The president was acting entirely within his rights and I fully support the president,” King said.

In my opinion al-Awlaki gave up his Constitutional right to due process when he left this country and joined its enemies. He declared war on the United States.

So what is it about war that the critics don’t understand? Back in the dark days of the Vietnam War the daily newspaper I worked for in Los Angeles sent me to Camp Pendleton to interview a Marine general about that war. A statement the general made during that interview seems to answer those critics:

“You cannot put a rifle in a Marine’s hand and send him to war as a diplomat.”

War is brutal. There is nothing Constitutional about it. There is no due process on the battlefield.

It simply boils down to kill or be killed.

No veteran that I know is in favor of war. The Americans who take up arms, do so for one reason only: to insure their fellow Americans continue to live in freedom. They are willing to die for that reason.

I don’t believe in cheering and clapping over the death of any human being, but I have no moral quandary over the killing of Osama bin Laden or al-Awlaki, both sworn enemies of the United States and as such have innocent American blood on their hands.

The legality of using a drone to take out al-Awlaki, I believe is answered by Kenneth Anderson, an international law scholar at American University’s Washington College of Law. Anderson said U.S. citizens who take up arms with an enemy force have been considered legitimate targets through two World Wars, even if they are outside the traditional battlefield.

“Where hostiles go, there is the possibility of hostilities,” Anderson said. “The U.S. has never accepted the proposition that if you leave the active battlefield, suddenly you are no longer an enemy.”

Benedict Arnold, the American turncoat during the Revolutionary War escaped retaliation, but was branded as a traitor and died a pauper in England. However we don’t have to go all the way back to the Revolutionary War to find justification for killing dangerous people who do evil things – it happens nearly every day in police shootouts with killers.

Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence in 2010, told a congressional hearing that the U.S. was prepared to kill Americans affiliated with al-Qaida. Harold Koh, the State Department’s senior legal advisor, in a speech to a Washington legal symposium, said:

“The U.S. is in armed conflict with al-Qaida as well as the Taliban and associated forces in response to the horrific acts of 9-11 and may use force consistent with its right to self-defense under international law.”

Adwar al-Awliahi freely chose his allegiance and thusly renounced his Constitutional right to due process.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

You may have missed it with all the media hype over a rogue satellite tumbling from the skies toward the United States, but there was something else in the air last Friday, Sept. 23. In the wee hours while we slept, we changed seasons.

It is now fall, even though the temperatures are in the 80s. However, from the dark clouds here and there, cooler weather and rain are in the prediction, but. I don’t need the weatherman to tell me all this – I feel it in my bones.

The change in the weather happened when the autumnal equinox ushered in the fall season in the Northern Hemisphere. It is the time on the calendar when day and night are equally 12 hours apart. According to the Astronomical Almanac the sun crosses the celestial equator headed southward bringing with it cooler temperatures as a precursor of winter. During these fall months the sun will rise exactly due east and set exactly due west.

The seasons are reversed in the Southern hemisphere where on the same date in 2011, spring has occurred down under. The different seasons in the two hemispheres is caused by the tilt of the Earth’s axis.

Most people see the earth as smooth and round as a billiard ball, but French professor Etienne Ghys, says in truth it is flat along the axis from pole to pole to create an equatorial bulge that is “puffing out” and distorting it due to the force of its rotation.

There is an urban myth that during the fall equinox it is possible to perfectly balance an egg. If you like your eggs over easy don’t try it. It’s a myth. Of course, if you prefer scrambled eggs go ahead and experiment.

I always reasoned the season was called fall because that is when the trees do a strip tease and shed their leaves, but there is a better explanation than my guess work. The word “fall” is actually an American colloquialism, the exact derivation is unclear, but it probably came from the Old English word, feallan, which means “to fall from a height.” So my theory isn’t so far fetched.

Poetically, however, I prefer autumn as a more apt word for the season. That word can be traced to the original Latin word “autumnus.” Both words today are interchangeable and no matter how you say it, this time of year the leaves and the temperatures are going to fall.

After the on-again, off-again summer this year, frankly I am ready for fall and even look forward to the soft rain that is sure to follow. There is a little nip in the night air already, and the leaves are starting to turn into their fall colors.

Oh, by the way. That 13,000 pound satellite, the size of a bus, has landed, but NASA isn’t sure where. Nicholas Johnson, chief orbital debris scientist, says, “we may never know.” Speculation is that chunks of it broke off during its fiery decent. NASA did warn the public if they spotted any of the debris to call the authorities and not tamper with it. It is the property of the U.S. government, they cautioned.

This fall, more than leaves fell on the first day of autumn.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

You may have missed it with all the media hype over a rogue satellite tumbling from the skies toward the United States, but there was something else in the air last Friday, Sept. 23. In the wee hours while we slept, we changed seasons.

It is now fall, even though the temperatures are in the 80s. However, from the dark clouds here and there, cooler weather and rain are in the prediction, but. I don’t need the weatherman to tell me all this – I feel it in my bones.

The change in the weather happened when the autumnal equinox ushered in the fall season in the Northern Hemisphere. It is the time on the calendar when day and night are equally 12 hours apart. According to the Astronomical Almanac the sun crosses the celestial equator headed southward bringing with it cooler temperatures as a precursor of winter. During these fall months the sun will rise exactly due east and set exactly due west.

The seasons are reversed in the Southern hemisphere where on the same date in 2011, spring has occurred down under. The different seasons in the two hemispheres is caused by the tilt of the Earth’s axis.

Most people see the earth as smooth and round as a billiard ball, but French professor Etienne Ghys, says in truth it is flat along the axis from pole to pole to create an equatorial bulge that is “puffing out” and distorting it due to the force of its rotation.

There is an urban myth that during the fall equinox it is possible to perfectly balance an egg. If you like your eggs over easy don’t try it. It’s a myth. Of course, if you prefer scrambled eggs go ahead and experiment.

I always reasoned the season was called fall because that is when the trees do a strip tease and shed their leaves, but there is a better explanation than my guess work. The word “fall” is actually an American colloquialism, the exact derivation is unclear, but it probably came from the Old English word, feallan, which means “to fall from a height.” So my theory isn’t so far fetched.

Poetically, however, I prefer autumn as a more apt word for the season. That word can be traced to the original Latin word “autumnus.” Both words today are interchangeable and no matter how you say it, this time of year the leaves and the temperatures are going to fall.

After the on-again, off-again summer this year, frankly I am ready for fall and even look forward to the soft rain that is sure to follow. There is a little nip in the night air already, and the leaves are starting to turn into their fall colors.

Oh, by the way. That 13,000 pound satellite, the size of a bus, has landed, but NASA isn’t sure where. Nicholas Johnson, chief orbital debris scientist, says, “we may never know.” Speculation is that chunks of it broke off during its fiery decent. NASA did warn the public if they spotted any of the debris to call the authorities and not tamper with it. It is the property of the U.S. government, they cautioned.

This fall, more than leaves fell on the first day of autumn.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

This may sound strange, but I am cursed with a photographic memory. If you wish you had such a gift, be careful what you wish for.

Since electronic technology switched from film for which the principal ingredient is silver nitrate, to digital imaging using pixels mapped onto a grid and stored in the digital camera’s memory, it seems to be putting my photographic memory a bit out of focus.

When I heard that Richard Packman, a binary code scholar of sorts, was a presenter at Umpqua Community College’s Extraordinary Living Conference and would give a lecture on memory, I signed up for his workshop. Richard put on his very best college professor lecturer’s cap and wowed his packed audience with his memory tricks. He had my complete photographic memory recording each detail without taking one note.

He scolded the schools for not requiring students to memorize and to recite what they had memorized, which he said was a key to a good memory. He cited how as youngsters we learned the alphabet by chanting the letters. He noted how we learned spelling and grammar by memorizing the rules, like “i before e, except after c.”

He gave a litany of tricks to jog the memory, how to remember names, streets and where you last left your keys by visualizing. He suggested reminding yourself that you are “putting the keys in my coat pocket,” and retaining that clear memory of doing it.

He touched on using mnemonic devices such as “every good boy deserves favors,” to learn musical notes, or “ROY G BIV” (red, orange, yellow, blue indigo, violet) to memorize the colors of the rainbow. When computers replaced typewriters in newspaper offices, as a reporter I had to learn “CAD” to remind me that Control+Alt+Delete would shut down the computers at the end of a workday.

Packman even touched on an old trick I have used for years, a mind-over-matter trick that would please Mary Baker Eddy. Lately, he said, medical science has come to accept this method of dealing with pain. I have had too many needles and knifes poked into me during my lifetime and I do not do pain medicine very well. My method is to write books in my mind to make the pain go away. It works for me.

He gave some methods on how to relax and improve the memory through self-hypnosis techniques. My photographic memory was absorbing his lecture like a sponge.

Then he lost me when he went off on using numbers to kick start the little grey cells. At that point my old school photographic memory ran out of film. My photographic memory is word oriented and does not recognize those binary digits, pixels and bits. He lost me as he madly put numbers up on the grey board (schools don’t have black boards any more, nor do they use chalk.)

He showed how to remember months and dates with those scattered numbers he sketched on the board. I was thinking, why not just use an old fashioned calendar, but then I remembered

my mother looking at my school report card and exclaiming that she didn’t understand how I could get an A+ in English and a D- in arithmetic.

I was okay as long as it was a written equation where I could use word logic to solve the problem, like if Sam had two apples and gave one to Jack, how many apples did he have left? Easy, readable question. It was when the numbers were stacked against me that I had trouble. According the list of supplies needed by students this year, a calculator is listed as a required classroom device. I was born 70 years too soon, or I just didn’t have enough pixels.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR. 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

Of all the 9/11 stories of a decade since terrorists attacked the United States, one stood out for me as a sign of hope. It was a simple story with a powerful message, written by Phil Gast of CNN about Gee Rittenhouse who was one of those searching in the rubble of the Twin Towers after 9/11 when he noticed something unusual in the pile of dust and debris.

On examination, he found what be believed was an office plant that had fallen in the collapse of the upper floors of the Towers. What was left was merely a ball of roots and twigs. He placed the plant inside a plastic bag, brought it home and planted it in a pot. Miraculously it revived. As the plant grew, it became so special that when his job transferred him to France in 2008 and he could not take the plant with him, he left it in the care of a friend, Jim Donovan, whose tender care of it led to its first blooming, Rittenhouse said.

Now ten years later it is still blooming, Gast wrote, “having risen like a Phoenix from the ashes as a symbol of hope, life and comfort to those who lost loved ones on that fateful day.”

Although the species has not been identified. The photos of the plant show it to be some sort of perennial. The flowers appear to be something like honeysuckle blooms, with a scent of lemony jasmine.

The tenacity of plants to survive against the greatest of odds has always intrigued me. More than 30 years ago I was diagnosed with terminal cancer and frankly told I had three months to live. My wife’s garden club gave her a red rose bush as a remembrance of me, thinking she’d soon become a widow.

That plant survives today, despite the deer trimming it to a mere stick every season when they descend from the hills to sample every morsel on my acreage. Not only has it survived the ravenous deer, but also the man who helps with my gardening who has twice shredded it with a weed eater. These past few days three of the most perfectly formed red roses greet me every time I walked past it as if to say, I survived and so did you. I choose to believe it is my sign of hope.

My youngest son, Jeffrey Michael, a graduate of Roseburg high school, is now a Ph.D college professor of Urban Education. His specialty is training teachers to teach in urban areas. He is an international lecturer on the subject and is currently lecturing in Sweden.

His favorite theme to get the audience’s attention is to use Tupac Shakur’s hip-hop rap poetry “Roses Growing in Concrete,” as a symbol of children growing up in the ghettos of the world and struggling against all odds just to survive. “We might not change the world, but we can spark the mind that does,” he recently told an audience of teachers at Harvard University in a lecture entitled, “Hope required when growing roses in concrete.”

If you doubt the tenacity for plants to grow in the oddest places, don’t look too far. Much of Washington and Oregon is covered with the most tenacious wild plant of all — Himalayan blackberries. If their tenacity isn’t prove enough of survival, think about the lowly dandelion? If there is the tiniest crack in the concrete, a dandelion parachutist will find it, germinate to push up for air, water and sunlight. There is even hope for survival in that disgusting weed.

Rittenhouse has recently returned to the United States from France. He took a cutting from that plant he saved from the debris of the Twin Towers and rooted it in his own garden. To him, it is a symbol of hope as it should be for all of us.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

I am an English language freak. I have notebooks filled with odd facts about the Mother Tongue. For example did you know that the longest one syllable word in the English language is “screeched.” I particularly like vowels and could probably be a contender for Wheel of Fortune.

Think about this: “Rhythms” is the longest English word without the normal vowels, a, e, i, o, or u. There is only one common word in English that has five vowels in a row, “queueing,” The words “asthma” and “isthmi” are the only six-letter words that begin and end with a vowel and have no other vowels in between. “Isthmi” is the plural of isthmus. There are many words that feature all five regular vowels in alphabetical order, the most common are abstemious, adventitious and facetious.

For Scrabble players this is a legitimate word that will send you opponents to the dictionary: Cwm pronounced “koom,” defined as a steep-walled hollow on a hillside, is a rare case of a word used in English in which w is the nucleus vowel, as is crwth (pronounced “krooth,” a type of stringed instrument.) Despite their origins in Welsh, they are accepted English words.

Did you know there is no word in the English language that rhymes with month, silver, or purple. And the word “dreamt” is the only word in English that ends in the letters “mt.”

There are only four words in the English language, which end in “dous,” and they are tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous. “Stewardesses” is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

Antidisestablishmentarianism, listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, was considered the longest English word but has been demoted by the medical term pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis. In truth, it was coined word created to take over the title of the longest English word.

Soupspoons is the longest word that consists entirely of letters from the second half of alphabet. Almost” is the longest commonly used word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order. The longest uncommon word whose letters are in alphabetical order is the eight-letter Aegilops ,a grass genus. The longest common single-word palindromes are deified, racecar, repaper, reviver, and rotator.

The superlatively long word honorificabilitudinitatibus (27 letters) alternates consonants and vowels. “Fickleheaded” and “fiddledeedee” are the longest words consisting only of letters in the first half of the alphabet.

The two longest words with only one of the six vowels including “y” are the 15-letter defenselessness and respectlessness.

English only as two common words ending in “gry.} Angry and hungry are the only ones. “Underground” and “underfund” are the only words in the English language that begin and end with the letters “und.”

The word “therein” is a seven-letter word that contains thirteen words spelled using consecutive letters: the, he, her, er, here, I, there, ere, rein, re, in, therein, and herein. “One thousand” contains the letter A, but none of the words from one to nine hundred ninety-nine has an A. “Forty” is the only number which has its letters in alphabetical order. “One” is the only number with its letters in reverse alphabetical order.

The nine-word sequence I, in, sin, sing, sting, string, staring, starting (or starling), startling can be formed by successively adding one letter to the previous word.

Bookkeeper is the only word that has three consecutive doubled letters.

“Ough” can be pronounced in eight different ways. The following sentence contains them all: “A rough-coated, dough-faced ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough, coughing and hiccoughing thoughtfully.”

Now you are ready to take on Alex Trebek’s Jeopardy, but make sure you pronounce all those words correctly and put your answer in the form of a question. Me? I don’t think I could ring in fast enough.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

A column reader, Lorie Hemm of Elkton, wants to know why I haven’t written a column about my tomato harvest this year. The only answer I have to share with her is my Southern family recipe for fried green tomatoes. I sent her a card with the recipe enclosed.

Sadly, that tells the story.

With the last few days of “summer” weather coming in late August, those green tomatoes are blushing over their lateness, but still not completely vine ripened. I will admit to resorting to the window sill method to hurry their ripening in the hope of a homegrown tomato in my BLT.

The unpredictable weather pattern of the last few years has played havoc in my garden. This year there was rain and more rain that delayed my planting, then there were warm days intermingled with overcast days. The sun loving tomato plants grew leggy, and shivered through May, June and July.

By this time I should have shelves filled with stewed tomatoes, salsa and relishes, but here I am, Lorie waiting for my tomato crop to turn from a blush to a rich redness. Even the window ripened tomatoes are 100 percent better than the store bought cardboard ones.

My favorite quote comes from Lewis Grizzard, a columnist for Southern newspapers, who said: “It’s difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.”

Americans consume more than 12 million tons of tomatoes annually. That works out roughly to 18 pounds per person of fresh tomatoes and nearly 70 pounds of canned tomatoes, or tomatoes used in ketchup or tomato sauce.

Botanically the tomato is from the berry fruit family and is not a vegetable, although classified as a vegetable. It was first domesticated in Mexico and was at first thought to be poisonous because it was a nightshade plant.

Fortunately, Robert Gibbon Johnson ate a tomato in 1820 and survived. Slowly, Americans overcame their tomato phobia and today the tomato is the second largest vegetable crop in dollar value in the United States.

So why is the market tomato so tasteless? It is because the tomatoes are picked green and artificially ripened with ethylene, a naturally occurring plant hormone responsible for plant ripening. Early harvested tomatoes are subjected to the gas treatment causing the tomato to redden, but that also blocks flavor compounds, changes its texture, and gives the tomato a thicker skin to protect when shipping great distances.

Ag science has tried all ways to improve the market tomato. In 1994, the Flavr Savr tomato was introduced, the world’s first genetically modified fruit or vegetable approved by the FDA. The Flavr Savr tomato was designed to give supermarket shoppers, a genuine vine ripened tomato.

The technology blocked the gene that produces polygalacturonase, the enzyme that softens the tomato. That allowed the tomato to ripen longer on the vine and theoretically enhance the flavor while maintaining firmness for shipping. The Flavr Savr tomato did not win consumer confidence and was removed from the market after only three years.

The artificial gassing of tomatoes that are picked early continues. For the record, the the gassing process is safe because Mother Nature uses the same ethylene gas to vine ripen tomatoes.

Say what you may, the taste difference proves you can’t fool Mother Nature.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

Old age has some advantages not just aches and pains. The other day in a supermarket I was wiling away time while my wife shopped and I noticed activity in a particular aisle. I wandered over to see what the fuss was about. A mother was arguing with her teenage son while holding a list of items he needed for school.

That was when my attention was directed to a rack holding the first day of school requirements for every school in the area. Curious, I picked up a few and was shocked and wondered why a student would need all these items just to attend school especially in these economic times.

At my age when even my grandchildren are finished with school, I couldn’t help but remember my own children’s needs for their school year. No such demands were made.

In my own schooling years, the first day of school meant you had a notebook and a pencil, period. The teacher always had an extra pencil in case you forgot yours. The calculator consisted of the times table on the back of a composition notebook.

A backpack was usually a leather book strap that helped you hand carry your books.

Simpler times, obviously.

The lists I reviewed are complicated as each school has different demands. I liked the notice from Melrose Elementary that told parents “all school supplies will be purchased by the Pareent/Teacher Action Network.” All the student needed was a backpack large enough to carry a binder and homework folders, the notice said.

The Green Elementary School notice to parents said the school supplies had been purchased, adding that a $12 fee would be collected from each student, but if that fee created a financial hardship, there was help in the community. I give three cheers to these two schools and believe a fee for supplies is the correct procedure, since most of the schools indicated the supplies would be shared in a communal arrangement and replenishment would be expected from the students.

Rose Elementary in Roseburg up to grade three, requires a $10 fee per student to fund the shared supplies and asked the parents not to send individual supplies. The school did require each student to bring a box of Kleenex. I balked at that requirement until my wife informed me I hadn’t checked the price of tissues lately. Some schools required than one box of tissues. Okay, okay, this old crusty male realizes there are many runny noses to be wiped during a school year.

Rather than those times tables on the back cover of my composition book, many of the schools were requiring “scientific” calculators – some even specifying a brand name. One school beginning with the 5th grade required students to bring a flash drive memory stick for a computer. The flash drive memory sticks were normal requirements for most upper grades.

My children all had to have plenty of three-ring binder filler paper during the school year, but I was amazed at some schools requiring as many as three reams of blank computer paper. I guess in this paperless society there is a great need for computer paper.

Speaking of three-ring notebooks, one school banned the use, claiming in a class of 20 plus students the opening and closing of the three rings is deafening. Some schools required the students to bring a pair of tennis shoes for P.E., but strangely required the students keep the tennis shoes at the school. If the noise of 20 plus three-ring binders opening and closing is a problem, think about 20 plus sweaty tennis shoes.

I loved the notice from Camas Valley schools that required students to bring a pair of old shoes “that can get dirty.” It didn’t explain why.

Oh, well, old age does have its advantages. I no longer need to know why.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)