History

I've been slogging through the ten hours of the PBS series, The Roosevelts. So far I've watched six and a half hours of it and I love it. In fact I have always loved history. Other than memorizing the exact dates of things, history was my favorite subject in school. I always figured that if I came within five years of an event on a test, I was good. My favorite history teacher was in seventh grade, Mrs. Sandidge. I think she was around a hundred years old at that time so most of the history of our country she knew first hand and you could always depend on her to set the record straight. One thing she used to do was let us have a day where we could browse the little library she kept in the back of the classroom. It was full of old magazines and history books that included things not in our curriculum. In fact it was in Mrs. Sandidge's library that I learned the story of Fatty Arbuckle and the champagne bottle scandal. I remember that the story didn't shock me, only how great it was that Mrs. Sandidge would have such entertaining reading material. Getting back to The Roosevelts, there is one thing that I learned from watching that documentary, and that is that Teddy Roosevelt was a damn good looking man in his younger years...

...and then he got hit with the ugly stick.