In today's Casper Star Tribune is a profile of Mrs Kating, now 87 years old. I posted this in the Home Front for the great picture of her with what looks like a very big sixgun.

Here is the link to the Star Tribune article.

http://www.trib.com/special-section/news/h...58c98b58c6.html

THE WISE OLD INDIAN AND THE TWO WOLVES:-

'This may be the best way I have ever heard it explained!'

The Two Wolves-------------------------

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.

He said, 'My son, the battle is between two 'wolves' inside us all.

One is Evil.-------

It is anger, envy, jealousy, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is Good-------.

It is joy, peace , love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.

The grandson thought about it for a minute.

And then asked his grandfather: 'Which wolf wins?'

The old Cherokee simply replied,

'The one you feed .'

Top/Sgtleo

Emergency Weather Bulletin

This text is from a county emergency manager out in the western part of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan after a severe snow storm ...

The Mining Journal,Marquette, MI

WEATHER BULLETIN

Up here in the Northern part of Michigan we just recovered from a Historic event --- may I even say a "Weather Event" of "Biblical Proportions" --- with a historic blizzard of up to 44" inches of snow and winds to 90 MPH that broke trees in half, knocked down utility poles, stranded hundreds of motorists in lethal snow banks, closed ALL roads, isolated scores of communities and cut power to 10's of thousands.

FYI:

Obama did not come.

FEMA did nothing.

No one howled for the government.

No one blamed the government.

No one even uttered an expletive on TV.

Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton did not visit.

Our Mayor's did not blame Obama or anyone else.

Our Governor did not blame Obama or anyone else either.

CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC did not visit - or even report on this category 5 snow storm.

Nobody demanded $2,000 debit cards.

No one asked for a FEMA Trailer House.

No one looted.

Nobody - I mean Nobody demanded the government do something.

Nobody expected the government to do anything either.

No Larry King, No Bill O'Rielly, No Oprah, No Chris Mathews and No Geraldo Rivera.

No Shaun Penn, No Barbara Striesand,

No Brad Pitts, No Hollywood types to be found.

Nope, we just melted the snow for water.

Sent out caravans of SUV's to pluck people out of snow engulfed cars.

The truck drivers pulled people out of snow banks and didn't ask for a penny.

Local restaurants made food, and the police and fire departments delivered it to the snow bound families..

Families took in the stranded people - total strangers.

We fired up wood stoves, broke out coal oil lanterns or Coleman lanterns.

We put on an extra layers of clothes because up here it is "Work or Die".

We did not wait for some affirmative action government to get us out of a mess created by being immobilized by a welfare program that trades votes for 'sittin at home' checks.

Even though a Category 5 blizzard of this scale is not usual, we know it can happen and how to deal with it ourselves.

I hope this gets passed on.

Maybe ......SOME people will get the message ............The world does Not owe you a living.

Top/SgtLeo

What follows is an article that I excerpted from my copy of the "V-MAIL" section of the News from the National WW II Museum and I am afraid many Americans have no idea of this happening on our shores.''

Quote:--

"Most people think of the U-Boat as only being a highly efficient ship-killer, but it also supported espionage, intelligence gathering and sabotage operations throughout the war. These missions were carried out at points throughout Europe, on the coast of Africa , within the Artic Circle and even in America. Before the end of the war, U-Boats made landings In North America on six separate occasions.

The first landing occurred on May 14,1942, when U-213 put Abwehr agent Alfred Langbein ashore near the village of Saint John on the Bay of Fundy coast of New Brunswick. Langhein spent the next two years in hiding without doing any spying at all before finally turning himself in to Canadian Naval Intelligence in Ottawa in September 1944.

Before dawn on June 13, U-202 put four saboteurs ashore near the village of Amagansett, Long Island as a part pf Operation Pastorius. Three nights late U-584 landed another group of four saboteurs near Point Vedera Beach, Florida. The two groups were to use explosives to destroy railroad bridges, defense plants and factories crucial to U.S military aircraft production. The Long Island group made their way to New York City where the team leader George John Dasch decided to turn himself in. Because of his cooperation the FBI was able to round-up the remaining saboteurs. All eight men were convicted of espionage by a military tribunal in Washington,DC.. Six were electrocuted by electric chair on August 8, 1942. The other two were ultimately deported back to Germany in 1948.

The fourth landing occurred during the night of November 9, 1942 when U-518 surfaced in Chaleur Bay in Eastern Quebec and put Abwehr agent Werner von Janowski ashore near the village of New Carlisle. With his unusual clothing and foreign accent, Janowski stood out among the Quebecois like a sore thumb, resulting in his arrest by Royal Canadian Mounted Police the next day.

The fifth ad perhaps most interesting landing began early in the evening of October 22, 1943, when U-537 anchored in Martin Bay just south of Cape Chidley on Canada's Labrador Coast. The following morning, personnel from the U-Boat assembled an automated weather station on a hill overlooking the bay. The station functioned for only a day before mysteriously falling silent.

The final North American landing occurred when U-1230 put ashore Abwehr agents Erich Gimpel and William Curtis Colepaugh at Hancock Point on Frenchman's Bay, Maine shortly after midnight on November 30, 1944. Gimpel and Colepaugh were given the ambitious task of infiltrating the aviation industry and the Manhattan Project. The agents made their way to Portland, Maine and then to New York City where Colepaugh lost his nerve and turned himself in to the FBI. Gimpel was arrested soon thereafter bringing Germany's final attempt at espionage in North America to an unsuccessful conclusion". End Quote

I am also aware of a couple other atures of saboteurs not chronicled here

Top/Sgtleo

Because being so busy with basic training, the troops were unable to have much contact with their families. Instead, they sent out postcards just to keep in touch. At times, they weren’t even able to write anything on the back of them. It was hard for the troops because they would go weeks, sometimes months without speaking to any of their family members. In turn, funny military postcards were made to in a way make fun of what the troops go through on a daily basis. These postcards allow for their family members to get a view into what their life is like now and also allows them to have some humor during rough times.

http://roadsidephotos.sabr.org/postcards/wwii.htm

Vee

If you grew up in Connecticut, you knew someone effected by the fire. I used to work with a nurse that had been a student nurse in 1944 and was on duty the day of the fire. Where my uncle worked they came around asking for blood donors that afternoon.

Also because most adults were tied up in war production, most of those killed or injured were under age 15.

Here is a basic overview:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford_circus_fire

These pictures were taken in Feb 1944 and sent to him at Anzio (I can only imagine how he

must've felt when he opened his mail & saw his dear home & family).

Here's his home at 21 Fairbanks Ave Wellesley MA, his parents, his sister Mary (taken in front of St John's Church where they were baptised & me too! and where Dad served at Mass as an altar boy). Last, but not least, is Dad's dog Jeff sunning himself in a pile of leaves fall 1943.

Who were YOUR loved ones on the homefront?

mary ann

This article was featured in one of my new and favorite magazines, America in WWII, August 2007.

By Mark D Van Ellis

Read it and think again...

Americans For Hitler

During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and trompe l’oeil to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.

This is incredible!!!

http://thinkorthwim.com/2007/08/19/1034/

By Carl Zebrowski

For a woman of the 1940s, stockings were just as essential to dressing up as a dress. Sheer hosiery enhanced the appearance of the leg and provided a neat, finished look to outfits for wear at the office, at church, or for dinner out.

Silk was the preferred material for stockings, because of its luxurious look and feel. But silk stockings were expensive and anything but durable. Women sometimes opted for cotton and wool, but those didn’t look dressy. Stockings created from manmade rayon were another possibility, but they didn’t fit well, tending to sag and form "knees" of their own that didn’t line up for long with those of the wearer. Women needed a better alternative.

Science came to the rescue. The chemical company DuPont launched an effort to produce synthetic silk in the 1920s. Working with a team of scientists for a decade, Julian Hill pulled a heated rod out of a solution of coal tar, water, and alcohol one day to find a sheer filament stretched between the rod and the solution. At room temperature, the filament looked and felt like silk. The new material made its debut at the 1939 New York World’s Fair as "nylon," from the abbreviation NY.

Nylon first hit the market as toothbrush bristles, fishing line, and surgical stitching. But on May 15, 1940, nylon stockings hit the shelves of New York City. By the end of the day, some 780,000 pairs had been sold. Soon the material and the hosiery made from it were synonymous, and stockings, regardless of what they were made of, became "nylons."

Because nylon didn’t stretch, the original nylons had to be manufactured in numerous different sizes. The material was knitted flat in various shapes and lengths and then sewn at the back so a finished stocking more or less followed the form of the leg—narrower above and below the calf and wider at the thigh. The tailoring was known as "fully fashioned" (not to be confused with well fitting).

By the end of 1940, 64 million pairs of nylons had been sold. But before the next year ended, war came, and the three most common sheer stocking materials—silk, nylon, and rayon—were all but lost to the war effort. Much of what little silk was available to the United States was used to make powder sacks for the military, because it left no residue inside gun barrels. "When anyone got word that the local Five and Dime store had received a shipment , lines would form through the store and around the block," Mary E. Mazzei of Cleveland, Ohio, wrote at hbo.com. Nylon was most useful to the military, going into parachutes, tents, ropes, and tires. Known as the "miracle fiber," it was so critical to the war effort that drives were held to collect worn-out nylons to be recycled for military use. Rayon had some of the same military uses as nylon, yet it remained the most widely available type of sheer stocking.

One solution to the stocking shortage was for women simply to wear cotton socks. The socks were short and worn folded over at the top of the ankle. Another popular option was to apply makeup to the leg, a tedious procedure that could include painting a black line up the back of the leg to complete the illusion. "When we could not get silk stockings we painted our legs with pancake makeup—used eyebrow pencils to make ‘seams,’" Marie R. Albig of Bergenfield, New Jersey, wrote at hbo.com; "but if we got caught in the rain, our leg makeup washed off."

The most reliable way for a woman to obtain nylons during the war was to live in a country where US troops were stationed. GIs earned a decent income relative to the war-ravaged economies overseas, so they often could afford to spend some of their disposable income out on the town and still have money left over to buy things. The post exchanges, or PXs, on their bases typically offered nylons, as well as chocolate and cigarettes, at low prices. Many of the men purchased these small luxuries to give as gifts to female friends.

With the dawning of peace, the stocking situation improved in the States, but not overnight. "I remembered...after the war was over and we heard that Penny’s had nylon stockings," wrote Helen Beaubier at kaccdouglassclan.com. "I ran out of the house and was going to run down to the store and get nylons and I got a pair and they were thick and they wouldn’t stay up; they were terrible; they were...just awful those first nylons that came."

Stockings survived for another two decades before they virtually disappeared. By then, DuPont had invented Lycra, which was added to hosiery to allow it to stretch to fit. Now, stockings could be made to fit snugly all the way up the leg and, in the form of pantyhose, continue over the hip. As skirt lengths rose higher and higher, stockings became obsolete. Pantyhose took over, relegating stocking sales once and for all to the likes of Victoria’s Secret.

...............................................................

Carl Zebrowski, a former daily newspaper editor and managing editor of Civil War Times and Columbiad magazines, and the author of the book Walking to Cold Mountain: A Journey through Civil War America, is the managing editor and website editor of America in WWII. This article originally appeared in the August 2005 issue of America in WWII.

http://www.americainwwii.com/stories/productwithlegs.htm