Editor’s Corner
Englewood Edge Editor Mark Chapman’s musings.
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New kid in town?
Remember the Englewood Herald-Tribune? That local edition of the New York Times-owned Sarasota Herald-Tribune and shut down its bureau here in the mid 2000s, when shuttered the Port Charlotte a few years later?
Well, the Times has decided to divorce itself from the H-T and its other NYT Regional Media Group holdings altogether, with a sale to Halifax Media Holdings nearing completion.
Continue reading this story…Never forget
Some months after Dec. 7, 1941, a 26-year-old married carpenter, a father of three small children, went to work with two other men of a similar age. They were sent to a woman’s house to do some remodeling work. When they arrived, the woman got angry.
“Why aren’t you men fighting for your country?” she demanded. The 26-year-old father of three explained he had young children at home, was their sole support. He was older than the men the government was signing up to go off to war at that time.
She would have none of it. The woman, incensed that these able-bodied men were not serving their country, called the contractor and told him to get these men out of her house and send someone else.
That day, the 26-year-old married father of three small children drove to the Navy recruiter and signed up to fight in World War II.
Then he went home to tell his wife, who was not happy.
He explained to her — and, decades later, to the son that was not yet born when he enlisted — that he was so mortified that he couldn’t face anyone else. Not even himself. He was older. He had children. He was colorblind, something that nearly disqualified him. But he begged, he pleaded, he lied. And he wound upon a troop ship headed for a string of islands in the South Pacific, islands with names like Tinian, Saipan, Guam and Iwo Jima.
Over the course of the next three years, Carl Chapman was a Seabee attached to a Marine unit. They landed with the Marines, fought their way ashore and then built air strips and base camps while the Marines pushed inland.
There were injuries, too: a creased foot from a bullet, a machete slash across the arm that might have been deadly had the enemy soldier not been shot as he delivered the blow. And there was the shrapnel in the head that got him sent back stateside to recuperate. He was training others for combat in Rhode Island and awaiting orders to head back to the war when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
It was eight more years before I was born. It took decades before my father was able to tell me the details of his service, and he left a lot out. I heard from my mother about the nightmares, the struggle to return to some semblance of normalcy after returning home.
I was always proud of my father’s service. He was, to me, a hero, even though he never told any stories of heroics. He didn’t have to.
My father died April 12, 1995. His ashes lie in the National Cemetery in Bourne, Mass. I think of him every day, but especially each year on Dec. 7, the day that will live in infamy, the day that changed my father’s life, and the lives of so many others, forever.
Arrest them!… Um, nevermind
The Case of the Purr-loined Pussycats has been resolved.
Nearly eight months after 46 cats and assorted cages, equipment and records disappeared from a warehouse at 5475 Williamsburg Drive, Punta Gorda, Charlotte County investigators have resolved the whodunnit, spurred on by the previous administration of EARS — Englewood Animal Rescue Shelter — the group responsible for, it appears, both the ownership and housing of the cats and their disappearance.
Say what?
Mr. Skidmore, it’s time to go
There is a wonderful line in the classic Broadway hit, “Guys & Dolls.” It is spoken by a gambler — by inference, a mobbed-up gangster — in the Save-a-Soul Mission where he is testifying to pay off a bet with Sky Masterson.
“I used to be bad when I was a kid. But ever since then I’ve gone straight, as I can prove by my record — 33 arrests and no convictions.”
Live, by remote
Summer is coming.
In Englewood, it has felt like summer for some time now, of course. Only way you can tell spring from summer is the alligators stop showing up on your doorstep in search of a girlfriend. And the love bugs go away.
But your intrepid Edge crew is in Norwalk, Conn., and has been since September (except for Eric, who joined us in March). Here, summer is coming, but it is, indeed, spring(except for the Englewood-like heat the past few days). No alligator mating, no love bugs. Just lots of forsythia (come and gone), lilacs and lots of other flowering things. Trees are sprouting their leaves, and we have finally felt it safe to put away the winter clothing. And what a winter it was.
A missed opportunity
OK, I admit it. Every time I get another press release from The Hermitage Artist Retreat breathlessly announcing a wonderful evening of music or drama created by a Hermitage artist-in residence, my blood pressure spikes.
Why? Because those programs are invariably held in Sarasota.
County cost-cutting
A number of weeks back, Edge received a comment on a story suggesting that county government job cuts had not gone far enough, and that “hundreds, if not thousands more” needed to be made.
At the same time, both Sarasota and Charlotte counties have been touting their cost-saving cutbacks, trumpeting their elimination of jobs and the resultant savings for the taxpayers.
Yes, we scam
It’s getting so it’s just not safe to get old.
Used to be the things you had to worry about were physical — age spots, dry skin, sagging stomachs and, um, other things, things that got hard when they should be soft, things that got soft… well, you get the picture.
Now most of those problems can be corrected with creams, tucks, grafts and pills. As for the heart, Big C, stroke and other major afflictions, even those are better controlled these days. That’s one of the reasons people are living longer.