Business: Secretary Melissa Earnest and Treasurer Marvin Downing had prepared the minutes and treasurer’s report and distributed copies to those in attendance. Bob Lochte moved to accept the minutes as presented with Lonnie Maness seconding the motion. The motion carried. John Robertson moved to accept the treasurer’s report as presented with Bob Lochte seconding the motion. The motion carried. Membership dues have remained the same and are payable to Downing for the 11-12 membership year. Earnest, the Journal editor, thanked Ann Adams and the personnel at the University of Tennessee Martin printing department for another wonderful printing of the Journal. Earnest noted this year’s edition was truly a page-turner! Cecelia Edwards showed the progress she has made on the quilt. It basically needs the border and the quilting completed to be finished. In new business, Claybrook presented the following slate of officers for 11-12: President – Gil Mathis; Vice-President – Bob Lochte; Secretary – Cecelia Edwards; Treasurer – Marvin Downing and Member-at-Large – Melissa Earnest. John Robertson and Bob Lochte moved to accept the slate of officers by acclamation. The motions carried for each office.

Program: Claybrook introduced John Robertson as the guest speaker. Robertson has lived in Paducah for more than 50 years, researching its history for many of those years. Robertson added Vonnie Shelton of the McCracken County Public Library had been assisting him in transcribing the letters of Jennie Fyfe. Fyfe arrived in Cairo, Illinois, on her way to Paducah, Kentucky to work as a nurse during the Civil War era. The letters she wrote to her family provide an eyewitness account of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s arrival in Paducah. Fyfe wrote about the Paducah raid while she was in hospital #2 where she could see the rebels arriving. Fyfe eventually began a new part of her life in the spring of 1865 after the Civil War ended. She started working as a teacher and supported the recently freed African Americans in their quest for education. Fyfe was part of the movement devoted to the advancement of freed blacks, especially in Louisiana. She was an accomplished woman in her own right and died from complications of cataract surgery. Fyfe’s grave is in Lansing, Michigan and her letters belong to the University of Michigan, but Robertson and Shelton obtained permission to transcribe them and to have the information presented at the JPHS meeting.

Adjournment: The fall meeting will be held in November in Martin, Tennessee, in conjunction with the West Tennessee Historical Society. Dr. Stan Dunagan will present a program on the New Madrid earthquake. Members and guests were encouraged to take advantage of the half-price admission to the Quilt Museum after the meeting was adjourned.

Dr. Mulligan’s presentation will be rescheduled sometime during the summer.

To help with this year’s possible discussions, here is a little of what the experts say.  Sweet potatoes and white potatoes are not related even though the light yellow skinned sweet potato has a dry, crumbly texture similar to the white potato.   Most commonly called yams are the “sweet potatoes” that are darker orange to reddish with thicker skins and a sweet, moist, orangy flesh.  Sweet potatoes and yams are long with ends tapering to a point as opposed to the white potato’s rounded ends.   The experts say that yams are the tubers of a tropical vine. The word, yam, is of African origin and was first recorded in American in 1676.

Within the Jackson Purchase, two communities celebrate the sweet potato’s popularity yearly. In Kentucky, Benton in Marshall County holds its annual Tater Day Festival the first Monday in April.  Begun in 1843, the town’s population would come together to celebrate spring and trade in sweet potato slips (used to grown the crop.)  Benton’s Tater Day is said to be the oldest continuous trade day in the U.S.   There is always a parade, games, carnival rides and a “flea” market.

In Gleason, (Weakley County) Tennessee, the sweet potato became the town’s number one agricultural export early in the 20th century and  gained for it the nickname of Tatertown.  On Labor Day weekend every year a “Tater Town Special” is held to celebrate the economic contribution of this crop.  The celebration is a community homecoming affair with a parade, good food, high school reunions, family reunions and on Sunday a community-wide church service.

Well, knowing all this won’t make the “taters” taste any sweeter, but maybe it will make the table talk interesting and different!  Happy Thanksgiving!

(Information for this posting found on the Internet at www.gleasononline.com/tater_town_online.htm; en.wikipedia; www.utm.edu; www.homecooking.about.com)

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few” – Winston Churchill, WWII

Answering their country’s call to duty, our warriors have been sent all over the world to defeat those who wanted to take from us our freedoms and our tangible riches.  Our warriors all came back – some only in spirit, their bodies left on foreign soil, some physically but wounded either in body, mind, or spirit.   We honor and remember their service by setting aside special days: Memorial Day, 4th of July, Veterans Day and erecting monuments.  But so many of us, when the parades and speeches are over, go home and forget our warriors until the next “round” of parades and speeches, or heaven forbid, war.

But it is our veterans, 24.9 million of them, who live every day with the aftermath inflected by horrors of  their war.  A grateful government cannot possibly administer adequately to all of the every day and special needs of these warriors.  And so, many private organizations have been formed to help supply these needs, some by the veterans themselves.  A movement has been started to create an American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial in Washington, D.C. If you value the service rendered for you by these veterans, you might want to visit some of these websites:

• American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial: www.avdlm.org
• Veterans of Foreign Wars: www.vfw.org.  The VFW’s Buddy Poppy program provides employment for disabled vets.
• Disabled American Vets: www.dav.org
• www.freedomisnotfree.com
• www.help4vets.org
• Strummings for Vets provides music therapy: www.strummingforvets.org
• www.woundedwarriorproject.org

A simple browser search will also identify other sites dedicated to the veterans, including ones containing poetry.

The final service we can do for our fallen soldiers is bury them, giving them forever to a merciful Higher Power.  In addition to the military cemeteries on American soil, the United States through the American Battle Monuments Commission maintains 24 cemeteries in 10 foreign countries.  These cemeteries are places of interment for our warriors who fell on those foreign grounds.  Most are found near former battlefield sites and our military bases throughout the world on land given in perpetuity by host nations.  Visit the Commission’s website at www.abmc.gov to find information about these cemeteries, obtain assistance with planning a trip to one of these cemeteries and/or memorials, find information about any service personnel buried or honored at a specific cemetery, obtain assistance in finding lodging/travel information and for obtaining a fee-free passport for family members so they can visit a grave.

(Information for this posting was found: (1) via an Internet search which rendered the websites set out in it, (2) the Sunday edition, November 7, 2010, of the Dallas Morning News, Dallas, Texas.)

UPDATE: You can now listen to the podcast here on the site or via your subscription in iTunes.

Flags are symbols and have been popular through the ages.  They generate feelings of intense national pride, patriotism,  and respect for country.   On the field of battle, the flag marks the warrior’s headquarters and is a rallying point.   In 1861, a private in the 1st Tennessee Infantry Regiment recalled: ‘Flags made by the ladies were presented to companies, and to hear the young men tell of how they would protect the flag, and that they would come back with the flag or come not at all, and if they fell they would fall with their backs to the field and their feet to the foe, would fairly make your hair stand on end with intense patriotism, and we wanted to march right off and whip twenty Yankees.” (The Flags of the American Civil War 1: Confederate, by Katcher and Scollins, ISBN 9781855322707, page 3, para. 1).

The scientific study of the history and symbolism of flags is called vexillology.   If you are interested, visit the North American Vexillological Association website where you can find information on flags from not only all parts of America but all over the world.

Commemoration takes many forms: placing flags on military graves, a moment of remembrance nationwide, the flying of flags at half-mast, parades honoring the dead and the veteran, a national concert, picnics, family gatherings, and sporting events such as the running of the Indianapolis 500.  The Veterans of Foreign Wars sell paper poppies to promote remembrance; John McCrae’s poem, In Flanders Fields, forever ties the image of the poppy to Memorial Day.

But do we remember our warriors’ sacrifices at any other time?  Do we stop during the course of our busy days and mentally thank them for our freedoms.  Do we care how our warriors are treated and cared for when they return, whether dead or alive?  Do we attend our local government meetings to see how, and if,  they are protecting and advancing those freedoms our warriors paid for with their blood and sweat and tears?  Do we do that simplest of all tasks of thankfulness – voting?

Remember

It is the soldier and the sailor, not the reporter

who has given us the freedom of the press,

It is the soldier and the sailor, not the poet

Who has given us freedom of speech,

It is the soldier and the sailor, not the campus organizer,

Who has given us freedom to demonstrate,

It is the soldier and the sailor,

who salutes the flag

Who serves beneath the flag

Who’s coffin is draped by the flag

Who allows the protester to burn our flag.

-Father Denis Edward O’Brien, USMC

Most of us value our nation and the wonderful life it provides and the freedoms it protects to allow us to do and say pretty much exactly what we want.   Most of us are good citizens.  We decorate our cars and our T-shirts with catchy slogans like “Home of the Free, Because of the Brave”.  But sometimes even with the slogans and even amid all the activity of the various Memorial Day festivities, we forget that our warriors willingly placed, and continue to place, themselves in positions of danger to keep our United States of America strong and safe and solvent and free.

We sleep here in obedience to law,

When duty called, we came

When country called, we died.

-Engraved on the state of Georgia’s statue

to its Confederate Dead, Antietam Battlefield

In gratitude, this Memorial Day 2010, we remember -

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