Scott P. Richert
Walk Like an Egyptian
About the time that we moved into our current house, my grandmother gave me a pot of Egyptian walking onions. Winter hardy to Zone 3, they are perfect for Rockford, where many plants that are perennial in my native Michigan struggle to make it through our harsher winters.
Tea Bags: A Cautionary Tale
It almost seems like a dream, after all these years. Long before Barack Obama nationalized General Motors and enrolled the American people in involuntary servitude to Big Insurance and Big Pharma; before George W. Bush bankrupted the United States in a quixotic attempt to stamp out all evil and to secure the existence of the state of Israel in perpetuity; even before Bill Clinton repealed the most important parts of the Glass-Steagall Act and signed into law the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, sending the American economy hurtling downhill like a snowball headed for Hell, a doughty band of activists in Rockford, Illinois, held a tax protest, complete with the tea bags that have become a national symbol of discontent today.
You Say Ásátru, I Say Shoresh
In these days of political correctness and multiculturalism, the surprising thing is that there was so little controversy when the board of School District 205 awarded a $40,000 contract to revisionist historian Michael Hoffman, author of They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America and Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition and Deceit.
Hot Rod Lincoln
He knew that he was destined for greatness. The son of uneducated manual laborers, immigrants to Illinois, he was never much of a student, but he would become a successful lawyer. From a young age, though, his sights were set on political power. Through his political connections, he got himself elected to the Illinois House of Representatives and, later, to the U.S. Congress from Illinois. Gregarious when he wanted to be, he was known to all by his monosyllabic three-letter nickname, not his trisyllabic given name.
For the Children
“I figured if he was there, I’d make sure he wasn’t there [again],” Harlan Drake, a 33-year-old truck driver, told Det. Sgt. Scott Shenk of the Shiawassee County Sheriff’s Department. But on the morning of September 11, 2009, James Pouillon was there, sitting across the street from Owosso High School as he had on so many other mornings. And so Harlan Drake stopped his car, pulled a .45 out of a bag, carefully took aim, and shot Pouillon. “He was still moving so I shot him one more time. I aimed under the ribcage going up toward the heart.”
The Bubble Economy
“Why,” Sheila Ramus asked, “if there are so many pro-lifers here, does Rockford have an abortion clinic?”
Sheila, my wife and I, and our pastor, Fr. Brian Bovee, were waiting to check in at Rockford’s annual Pro-Life Banquet. An hour before the dinner was scheduled to begin, the Holy Family Room (yes, that is its name) in the basement of Holy Family Parish was almost full. The crowd reflected not only the number of pro-lifers in Rockford but their composition.
The Triumph of the Insurance Companies
That cry you heard when the 216th vote was cast in favor of President Obama’s “healthcare reform” was the sound of insurance executives rejoicing before lighting their cigars with $1,000 bills. Just as Big Pharma was the chief beneficiary of President Bush’s Medicare prescription coverage bill, so Big Insurance has Barack Obama to thank for their coming years of plenty.
A Cautionary Tale
Jury selection began yesterday in the murder trial of Harlan Drake, the man who has confessed to killing pro-life activist James Pouillon, but the Associated Press reports that Shiawassee County, Michigan, prosecutors “have warned a judge that it will be ‘almost impossible’ to seat jurors who haven’t seen Pouillon’s demonstrations or formed an opinion about him.” Pouillon, the AP reports, “was everywhere—the farmers market, City Hall, the county courthouse, football games—with verbal taunts that were as shocking as his signs.” While the national media is finally covering this side of the story, Chronicles gave its readers the full story four months ago.
When pro-life activist James Pouillon was murdered in Owosso, Michigan, on September 11, I read a few dozen accounts from both national and Michigan news sources and quickly decided I had a handle on the story. Harlan Drake, the man who has admitted to murdering Pouillon, seems deeply disturbed, and he had murdered another man and pursued a third. While neither of Drake’s other targets was publicly involved in pro-life activities, the Shiawassee County Sheriff’s Department and the prosecutor’s office both confirmed that Drake had told authorities that he had targeted Pouillon for his “pro-life stance.”
An Arresting Moment
Five years ago, I wrote of the horror that Aaron Wolf and I experienced as we spent a morning photographing the old Turner School here in Rockford. Built in 1898, the massive brick-and-stone structure was closed 80 years later by a school board attempting in vain to avoid a lawsuit over busing. Today, little effort is being made to maintain the exterior, and weeds grow up in the lawn out front and the former playground in back. Four or five days out of every week, passersby might assume that the building is still shuttered.
Ethnic Cleansing
Some memories of auld lang syne on New Year’s Day 2010. This Rockford Files first appeared in the August 2002 issue of Chronicles.
