PAUL HARVEY 1918 - 2009

Paul Harvey died a week or so ago and I was thinking of him when I started this blog as you can tell by the heading of my second post.

I didn't much care for his politics but he put out an enjoyable product and THAT I enjoyed since I was a little girl.

On the other hand, my husband broke with him during the Nixon Administration when Mr. Harvey repudiated the Vietnam War so this family has always had a complicated relationship with him.

But now he is gone.

Chapter two.

. . . THE REST OF THE STORY

My husband comes from the Anacostia neighborhood in SE Washington DC. Anybody familiar with this area knows it is the quintessential definition of ghetto. More to the point, it is a slum. His story was tailor-made for Horatio Alger.

He got a job in a brokerage firm at the age of 17 as a janitor and a kindly old white gentleman assuaged his liberal guilt by taking a shine to an obviously bright young African-American boy from the neighborhood and helped get my future husband into a junior college, taught him the commodity trading business from the ground up, and three years later Archibald - his name clearly a hint to this blog's theme - was able to earn a scholarship to this gentleman's alma mater, Georgetown, and the rest, as they say, is history. A sort of reverse Alan Iverson story.

A curious thing began to happen. Archibald started putting distance between himself and the old neighborhood and managed to turn himself into a version of that white gentleman but, unfortunately, without his generosity. To this day, he still insists that he earned his scholarship to Georgetown and, as a result, has no one to thank for what later success he so clearly earned, being a poor kid from the ghetto and working so hard and on and on into the night. As much as I love him for his other attributes, he has a hole in his soul in this area.

I thought naming this blog the way I did would be a fitting testament to the gentleman who helped my husband. He had a delicious sense of irony. And now you know . . .

THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH . . .

Since my husband is odd, I have to create this nom de crossword to keep him from knowing what it is that I am doing. He would consider commenting on puzzles as declasse.

I am a fan of fiction (which he considers "frivolous") so I created this entire blog out of whole cloth but I consider it the realest thing I have ever done.

Go figure.