This is some stuff I know (or think I know) that I think might be interesting to my descendents. In most cases there is at least one other person that knows it too, but a number of them are now dead. The memory is a treacherous thing

And now Brother George is gone. Breathed his last about 10:00 pm December 17, 2004; 5 days past his 77^th birthday.. He outlived Dad by about 3 years; not in keeping with actuarial expectations which should have given him about 3 more years. I’ve listed elsewhere the multiple maladies that beset him in just over a year. It is as if evil was saving up to hit him all at once. I don’t understand it. He was the model of decency, healthy, brilliant, creative, multi-talented, and honorable; the kind of man the world needs. About the last full sentence he said to me without prompting by a question was “I never intentionally did anything to hurt someone else.” When I was not his match physically, I hated him. When I grew taller than he, I loved and admired him. He and JoAn were always good, gracious and generous to me. I never envied anything about him except his art ability and creativity, which he didn’t need and used only for his own entertainment

and which I surely could have to put to good use. God, rock him gently in your arms, please.
BEST MAN’S SON

George and JoAn tried to have a baby for about 10 years and decided to adopt. In 1963 or 4 they finally got a bouncing baby boy they named George Christian Keadle. Within less than a year JoAn was pregnant with what was to become Jennifer JoAn Keadle. They say that happens often; something about being too uptight – I don’t know…..

Anyway, they practiced the best of good parenting on both kids and seemed to be raising a well balanced, secure family. Chris being bright, stubborn and willful, Jennifer bright, sunny and adaptable.

When it was the proper time, they explained that he had been adopted; did and said all of the specified Dr. Spock stuff to help him adapt to the news. I personally don’t think it worked with him.

As the years went on Chris exhibited increasing negative traits; they attributed it to ‘low self-esteem’. I don’t know about that stuff, but he was an outstanding dirt biker in his teens, even competing in state competitions and finishing well. On one visit I found him with a ¼ inch drill and his bike, trying to decide where to drill to make it lighter (there were few places left on the bike for that process). Another time I visited to help him do a valve job on his first car. We found it was going to need new lifters as well, and his funds had been spent. He had a friend who would sell him a spare set for next to nothing but it required a trip across town. He had already exhibited a less than stellar driving habit and so was forbidden to use the family car. JoAn offered to drive him to his friend’s house, but he refused; it being impossible for him to be seen chauffeured by ‘Mom’. He would forego finishing his car before that. The impasse was solved by my offering to drive him; me not being ‘mom’. Now that’s stubborn.

As he matured he became more dissolute. One summer he came down here to help me paint the 1967 Chevelle, ver. 2.0. He had just finished a course at a tech. school on body work and was excellent at it. While here, he consumed almost a case of beer a day, and evenings talked on the phone with a girlfriend in Pittsburgh for hours. The paint job was a good one, but the phone bill nearly killed us.

In conversations with George over the years I learned that he became more and more estranged from his family and untrustworthy, He developed Crone’s disease and that was exacerbated by his drinking. It made him lose job after job due to unexplained absences. When penniless they let him live at home until he began stealing to support a whiskey/drug habit. He was everafter not allowed to be alone in their home; he had stolen and sold nearly all of George’s gun collection, among other things.

Around year 2000, they got a call from a doctor in Florida. She had used her MD credentials to open a sealed adoption file and find her illegitimate son. That began a series of discoveries about his origins that had to be devastating to Chris. He was hooked up with his biofather, an operator of a small airport in WV. He was offered a job at the airport and flying lessons if he wanted them. He was given a home inspection business in FL by the husband of his biomother. He was back in PA within several months. Nothing worked.

And so it was that he was found dead in his rooming house on January 3, 2005. I don’t know if it was nature, or suicide, or dope that did him in. With his record it could be anything. The best laid plans of mice and men often gang aglee.. I firmly believe that his final undoing was being connected to his biological parents. RIP.

TALKING TRASH

The stereotypical consensus is that all men think about having sex about ten times a day. And I am not one to argue with that holding. Advertising is geared to the concept and the institutions that cater to that desire are many. There must be some otherwise normal men who don’t fit the mold. I suspect most Catholic priests don’t fit the premise, and I am sure there are some otherwise ordinary guys who look upon overt attempts at titillation, suggestive commercial activities; in print, on film or CD, which is intended to arouse; suggestive garb such as is sold at Victoria’s Secret and subtle or not so subtle inferences in advertising as simply trash and are turned off by it. They are repelled by TV which portrays young people as heroic smart alecs who sass their parents and insult their friends; emulating the slutty garb of their musical idols. Much to the consternation of some of those who are or were close to me, I am such a one. Is there something wrong with me? If so, what?

Years ago Bob Debardalaben was a fixture around the Raleigh area hosting a number of shows on WRAL TV. It came to pass that I got to know him through attending high school ball games and his connection to the NC Egg Marketing Association; sometimes acting as their spokesman. Bob’s voice is one of those rare ones which is instantly recognizable and carries especially well even in low tones. He once invited me to attend a double feature skin flick, which surprised me since we were only casually acquainted and had little in common outside our kids’ sports activities. We went one evening and saw “Vixen”, which at the time was all the rage and some other awkward, highly suggestive movie featuring large boobs, high heels and lots of lacy straps. I sat there mostly repelled by what was on the screen and wondering what in hell did Bob get out of it. Later, much later, I deduced that he had thought if I were to see an hour and a half of that tasteless, repulsive stuff, I‘d be more likely to want to take Virginia to bed.

Today young teenage girls, if they are slender, wear clothes that intentionally show the midriff. That was how sluts dressed a generation ago, it was trashy then and trashy now.

There is much else that is trashy, of course and I am just as repelled by it. I perceive the erosion of customary decency exemplified by MTV, youth music idols and many sitcoms to be a serious threat to national survival. During the 2000 presidential campaign, a panel of women commentators; leading lights of feminine success in the media, were discussing the female view of the two candidates. They referred to Al Gore’s ‘package’. They were not talking about his garb, general appearance, personality and political views; they were discussing the wad in his crotch! How disgusting is that?

Dancing was instituted as a mode of courtship, probably before recorded history. It always implied affection toward and desire for the partner. Though spinning and swaying, stepping forward and back, the partners were at arms’ length. Then ‘clutch and hug’ dancing became acceptable, among all but the most devout Baptists :-). Holding the partner close raised the sensual level higher and the more the partners were attracted to each other, the tighter they gripped one another “Dancing Together Cheek to Cheek” so to speak. OK, it was still wooing of a decorous sort. Today the dancers do not make any pretext at mannerly courting; they instead go through all of the motions involved in copulation of the most energetic kind right out there for one and all to see with or without a partner. They do their best when the TV cameras are on them. Trashy is inadequate.

I probably do some trashy things myself if I am judged by those with a higher level of taste and decorum than that which I possess. It has become, in the eyes of many, a trashy thing as well as stupid, to smoke. The activity is concentrated among we of low intellect, inferior education, low standards of conduct and low income. Many of these same people who condemn my smoking will revel in titty bar activities, buy suggestive underwear for their sleep-in girlfriends, read Hustler and rent porno movies. What must I think about all of that?

MORE IMPRESSIVE NOW THAN THEN

The Korean who had the 'contract' to provide laundry service to the GIs in the 568 Ord HM Co. was called Sam. He had a crew of Korean women who washed our clothes after he collected them each week. He would gather clothes from about 3 or 4 squad tents each day and bring them back a week later. The washing was done, believe it or not, by soaking the clothes in a nearby stream and beating them with a stick. No soap. They were then wrung out and line dried. Since every GI had the last 4 numbers of his army serial number stamped inside his shirts and pants, it was simple for Sam to tie each one's clothes up in a bundle tagged with a name (in Korean) that Sam would assign to each of us.

Sam was also the manager of all of the house boys. Each tent had a house boy who kept the tent and its contents straight and clean. They shined shoes, swept up, made up the cots and so on. They were forbidden to go to the potable water trailer and fill our canteens, however. Each GI in a tent contributed about a dollar a week to pay the house boys.

About once a month, some house boy would be driven out of the compound for stealing from a GI. It might be money or it might be something readily converted to cash on the black market. Our house boy, Jimmy, was never accused; his Korean name was Kong Sung Dok. Koreans give their last name first, like Keadle Charles Richard, so his family name was Kong. He was a fine youngster about 12 years old. His build was what one would call stout. Not fat but well filled out and very strong. Sometimes he would wrestle with one or the other of the guys in the tent. Though giving up stature and weight to any of us, he held his own in every encounter. We got along very well and he seemed to take special care of my stuff.

When I was about to go on R & R to Japan, I was approached by Sam. He was nervous and began the conversation in a round about way, feeling out how I would react to doing him a big favor that was not exactly legal. He explained that it was impossible for a Korean to buy anything from outside the country and then import it. Martial law is like that. I was sympathetic to his dilemma. He gained confidence and finally showed me a wad of Military Payment Certificates (MPCs). This was the money GIs were paid in and was only supposed to be circulated within American activities, like the PX, the NCO club and so on. It naturally got into the Korean economy pretty fast, illegal or no, because it was what GIs bought stuff on the black market and paid their whores with. Sam wanted me to buy him some fabric and sewing materials in Japan while I was there. He showed me a catalog with a sewing machine in it. He needed that sewing machine. His 'contract' included tailor services along with the laundry. He showed me a catalog with fabrics and sewing accessories in it, each desired item marked.

I agreed to do what I could for him. He gave me $760.00, a princely sum in 1953, for even we wealthy GIs. He got me a second GI duffel bag to take with me to Japan, packed along with my clothes and the catalogs.

While in Tokyo, I exchanged Sam's $760.00 into Japanese Yen and got Sally to take me to the places from whence the catalogs had come. I bought each item Sam had marked and packed it into the spare duffel bag. I bought the sewing machine and had it packed and mailed to myself back in Korea. When I returned to Korea, Sam met me at the tent and I gave him the duffel bag stuffed with all of the items he had asked for plus the little bit of change from the purchases.. He was so grateful he had tears in his eyes.

About a week later I had a package at mail call. It was a big, heavy box; everyone wondered what my folks had sent me. Sam showed up as if by magic. The grapevine works in all languages. Again he was effusively grateful. He explained that several times earlier he had gotten GIs to 'shop' for him in Japan, but they never came back with as much stuff as his money should have bought. I was the only one who had not stiffed him.

About the time I was going to rotate back to the states, Jimmy came to me and said "Sam say "When you home go. Jimmy syanatta." He had been advised that he would be better off not working in the tent housing the staff of the Inspection Section anymore because in Sam's estimation, I was the only decent GI left in the unit. The implication was that the newer GIs were not ones to house boy for. Things had changed after the Armistice and the attitude and conduct of the GIs had also. The implication of that compliment becomes dearer to me with the passing years.

Another thing happened as my time to depart approached. I was relieved of duty a week before departure, which was standard practice because one's time would be consumed going to the medical and legal and personnel facilities to get cleared to depart.

­ On my last day at work, the Japanese, Pak, who managed the indigenous personnel in the Inspection Section approached with a large box during lunch hour. We had a bout 15 Koreans who did most of the grunt work in our section. I had worked with them for about a year and got to know all of them by nickname. They were all industrious and always anxious to please. They had learned their jobs well and though they got in arguments with, or more rightly chewed out by, some Inspection GIs, I never had a cross word for any of them.

Pak said, in his best pigeon English that the crew wanted me to have a gift for remembrance and in thanks for having the pleasure to work for and with me.

I opened the box and revealed a huge tea set. It was not your father's tea set. The pieces were all made of brass garnered from melted down shell casings. It had about a dozen pieces to it. A large round tray, a hinge lidded coffee pot, a hinge lidded tea pot, sugar and cream pitchers, with lids, each with a little saucer in which it rested and a finger bowl. The parts were sand cast, turned on a lathe and hammered into shape. The handles and base rings were soldered into place. Every piece was decorated over the entire surface by chisel and hammer with dragons, ivy vines and Korean symbology. Hinges were delicately crafted with little clipped nails for pivot pins.

I was stunned. Someone, a gifted craftsman, had hand made the whole thing and those guys in the Inspection Section had paid dearly to have him do it. There was no such thing as a store that sold that kind of stuff in a nation virtually destroyed by a war that had seen its capitol city fought over and occupiedoccupied four separate times in three years. They were all smiles as I admired the things. Sgt. Taylor, who was pulling his second tour in Korea (he liked it there) said "I never seen anybody else get a goin' away present from the gooks afore."

The tea set languished in Williamson for years, we not being able to cart it along with us as we moved from place to place establishing our family and life. It was finally discarded without my knowledge after it had corroded into a nearly unrecognizable mess. It is now that I miss it. It is now that it has become in my mind a symbol of some good effect I had on others, strangers, foreigners in a war-torn world. I ask myself, "Why did they do that?" What was it I did that brought them to that point? It was certainly nothing I consciously did.

HEROES

Most everyone has at least one hero. As a child, probably your first hero is Dad as long as he claims you and doesn't abuse you. By the time you learn that Dad was more human than hero;; that he had pluses and minuses in his conduct, intellect and personality, one casts about elsewhere for heroes. Celebrities enter one's consciousness because of heroic deeds recounted by the media in the performance of their specialty if it is one you wish to emulate. Anyone ever heard of Wilbur Shaw? As one matures, those kinds of heroes fade in importance as one becomes aware that those heroes too, are often more human than heroic. (Think O. J. Simpson).

At some point in one's maturing process, it becomes clear that a successful hero figure must be one whose total history is overridden by one or several deeds or accomplishments or conducts that general opinion finds is so important that the hero's humanity with all its negatives pales to insignificance.

It is at that point that one lands on true heroes, i.e. The Founding Fathers, Lee and Grant, the host of warriors like Eisenhower and McArthur who fought in WW I and WW II. All these worthies yet fail to provide a feeling of personal connection to the self, and one must still search the memory for individuals who can qualify as actual personal heroes. I have four such. Simply mentioning the names of two will serve to explain why I chose them.

The other two may need more explaining

The one distinguishing characteristic of these men was that they had a degree of bravery, in the enterprises for which they are famed, which their faint-of-heart contemporaries would call foolhardy.

Now, you probably have noticed all these guys were Charlies, like me. I assure you that when they became my heroes, I wasn't Charlie, I was Dick.
BIREFRINGENCE

There is a characteristic of some plastics that when exposed to light that includes the ultraviolet frequencies it will display a rainbow of colors when pressure is applied to the surface. You have probably noticed the effect on some touch screens. In some of these materials, the color is directly related to the pressure applied.

When I worked at Payne & Associates, Hal conceived of the idea that the principle could be used to devise a test method for pilot helmets. He assigned John Crook and me the task of putting the idea into practice. It would be a means to determine which helmets best distributed the impact of a collision providing safer designs with empirical data instead of using intuition.

We first found the plastic which responded to pressure most intensely and learned how to make it in ¼-inch thickness in useful amounts. Meanwhile, I was using the phone to scrounge up as many different types of government and civilian helmets as could be considered.

Using a platform of 1/2–inch steel, we constructed a spring loaded arm as long as the average male torso, which would accept a helmet on its free end and an ‘axe-head’ onto which the helmet would fall when released by a lanyard. Along-side was mounted a strobe light intended to flash at the instant a helmet, coated on its front half with the birefringent plastic, struck the ‘axe-head’. A Polaroid camera was aimed at the point of impact and when the test room was absolutely darkened, its shutter was fixed open.

It required many, many tests to get the timing of the impact and strobe flash to coincide. Most ordinary switches were too slow and technology had not yet brought us to the age of micro-circuits and other commonplace electronics such as we have today. We succeeded in devising a two-stage lanyard that released the arm and strobe at microscopically different times.

After a ‘strike’ the film would be ejected from the camera and the room lit again. Anticipation was high as we waited for the old-style Polaroid picture to develop. Many detail adjustments were required to get a satisfactory result, but the color rainbows showed clearly which helmets concentrated the energy at the point of impact and others that spread the energy widely around and over the helmets. Turned out that the best of those we could get for testing was the old fashioned leather helicopter pilot helmet, LPH-1. Oh well.
STUNNED

At the end of September, 2000, I got a letter from the Sovereign Grand Inspector General of the Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction, U.S.A. It informed me that I was to receive the 33rd degree along with many other Scottish Rite Masons at the 200th anniversary celebration of Scottish Rite in Charleston, SC in October, 2001.

Now the 33rd degree has always been to me an honor bestowed only upon the most deserving and productive of Scottish Rite Masons, those who have contributed much to their community and to the Brotherhood by serving in many of the multitude of offices, working on committees, acquiring candidates for the degrees and performing in much of the degree work not only in Scottish Rite, but also in their Blue Lodges; men like Eddie Styles, Hiram Casebolt, Jack Howard, Dewey Crutchfield and Harry Holland, to whose Light in Masonry I could not hold a candle.

Having done little of that over the years, I sincerely believe that the honor is beyond any I deserve, and I had originally intended to refuse to accept it;; in-as-much as bestowing that honor upon me would cheapen it. On the other hand, to refuse would be an insult to those who had proposed and voted upon my nomination, would it not?

A long conversation with a Mason whom I deeply respect and whose knowledge of all aspects of Masonry is nearly unlimited caused me to decide to accept the White Cap, the pin and the honor.

If I live long enough to attend the ceremony in Charleston, I plan to give a little speech to my brothers at the next following Scottish Rite meeting in the Valley of Raleigh.

Brethren: Admiral Jim Stockdale is a hero of a generation ago. He suffered countless years of torture as a POW after being shot down over North Vietnam. Another of his admirers, Ross Perot, chose the Admiral to be his running mate in the 1992 general election, as much for his devotion to duty, unquestioned patriotism and honorable conduct as it was for his suitability as a vice president. In his acceptance speech, Admiral Stockdale began by saying: "I'm Jim Stockdale. What am I doing here?" As regards the 33rd Degree, I echo his words

In the 15th Degree, there is a passage where Zerubabel says in effect "The honors and awards that are in the power of men to bestow are of little value to me." I cannot say I entirely agree.

The last line of a hymn in the Baptist Hymnal goes much like this "And if I should win any praise, let the glory go to God.

Thank you.

If my friends and relatives cared about Masonry, they would share my surprise, embarrassment, and pride at this humbling turn of events. As best as I can tell, except for my dear Betty Jo, no one I am related to or any acquaintance outside of my Masonic Brethren gives a damn about Masonry. And poor Betty can’t know about this or anything else in her present condition. Some do accept the Fish Fry and Bar B Q tickets I give them, however.

WHAT N. J. BURELL TAUGHT ME

In Man and the Universe Mr. Burell taught me that if you put a human in a big blender, hit the puree button and then did a chemical analysis of the contents, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish it from a sample of ordinary sea water.

I also learned that the extent of living things on Earth is so limited that if you imagined Earth to be a basket ball, life on the ball would consist of a thin green slime on the surface, much like its condition if left out in the grass for several warm, damp nights. You see, virtually all living things on Earth exist within 8,000 feet of sea level, up or down. That is one sixteen thousandth of Earth’s diameter.

And I also learned that anywhere in the universe that a ball of Earth’s size and makeup, orbits a star of our sun’s size at the same distance, given sufficient time, life will appear. It will be carbon based but not necessarily look like us (or even like dinosaurs).

He didn’t teach me this: God’s laws of physics press forward toward life inexorably and unavoidably, and if we were to disappear tomorrow, there would be other us’es on other planets in the universe doing His bidding and breaking His heart as has continuously happened since He burst the original singularity an unknowably long time ago.