As Coronavirus Deaths Soar the World Lost a Great Human Being

Randy Jasper, Family Farm Defender also standing for Women's health and rights.

Just after the U.S. set another grim record for the greatest number of Coronavirus deaths since the pandemic began.  The total death toll reached 224,000 with the possibility that number could nearly double again by the end of the year.  And just after Donald Trump dodged responsibility, babbled nonsense, and lied repeatedly in his final debate with Joe Biden a friend was added to the roster in Covid-19 ravaged Wisconsin.

But he was more than just a statistic.  Randal Jasper’s wife and life partner posted on Friday that “The world lost a great human being this morning. We must remember all of the things Randy did so that we can repeat them. We are all damn lucky to have known him.”

Randy was a life-long farmer with a special knack for fixing and restoring farm equipment, especially red International Harvester machines.  He had an unquenchable zest for life and enjoyed his reputation as a champion tractor puller in southwest Wisconsin. 

But he also defied the stereotypes you many have of farmers.  Randy was no red MAGA hat wearing cultist.  He was in the long tradition of farm radicals stretching back though the Grange movement, the Progressives, populists, and the Depression era Farm unions.  As one close friend noted on Randy’s Facebook timeline, “He lived the lives of 10 men. He was caring, passionate, and free spirited. He marched for causes most men won’t stand for, from Cuba to Washington D.C.  An advocate for Farmers and Farm Families.”  Those commitments were deep and also included standing for a woman’s right to choose and Black Lives Matter even in his rural, virtually all white county.  He visited Cuba with agricultural delegations and was a stout supporter of the people and the revolution.

Randy demanded Justice for George Floyd from his IH tractor.

Randy described himself on his Facebook page as “farmer who traveled to Cuba 3 times and now know workers and farmers must have our own government.”

All of which was why the equally remarkable Zena McFadden became enamored of him.  She was the daughter of one of the other “great migrations”—the movement of Southern Appalachian White to Detroit during the Depression and World War II to work in the auto industry and other Northern factories.  But she also had a strong connection to her Tennessee roots, its folktales and music and the emotionally cathartic Pentecostal faith.  She may have abandoned that faith, but never the feeling of comfort, community, and hope that it fostered.

Zena went on to be a gifted teacher and a spellbinding story teller.  She often shared her stories about her father and family at story telling festivals and at the Tree of Life UU Congregation in McHenry, Illinois.  She is also a committed activist and member of the Socialist Workers Party who spends time selling The Militant at rallies, marches, picket lines, and demonstrations.  In the course of their activism Randy and Zena connected and fell in love.

Zena and Randy shared a weeing kiss.

Randy had already been married and had an adult son he was close to.  After seeing each other for some time and city girl Zena spending time on Randy’s Richland Center farm during the summers they married.  Zena kept what they called the “Illinois house” in Sycamore while she continued to teach public school science.  When they were in Illinois I saw them both at church and got to know Randy.  We often had long conversations during Social Hour or at social functions.  He was as good a story teller as Zena even if he saved that talent for more intimate chats.  We often spoke of our childhoods and of his growing up on the farm.  He told some hairy farming tales, including how he lost three fingers on one hand in a gruesome farm machinery accident and nearly being crushed when a tractor rolled over in soft ground.

On Monday, October 12 Zena shared the news that Randy had been admitted to a local community hospital in Wisconsin with pneumonia caused by Covid 19.  She kept us all posted with daily bulletins, but despite some ups and downs, his condition continued to deteriorate beyond the capacity of the local hospital.  He was air-lifted to the University of Wisconsin hospital in Madison where he was given the most up-to-date care.  Despite the care he died early Friday morning.

I will best remember Randy for one of his best stories.  A few years ago at a national farm conference, he met some Black farmers from Arkansas who were struggling to stay on their land and were too poor to afford modern equipment.  They were still plowing by hand behind mules, back breaking work.  Rand went back to Wisconsin and managed to collect older tractors, now considered obsolete.  He lovingly repaired and restored them, loaded them on a trailer and with Zena at his side drove them to Arkansas to give them for free to those Black farmers.

Rest in Peace and Power, Randy!

Note—Memorial services for Randy are pending. 

 

 

Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay—Murfin Corona Confinement Music Festival

Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding.

Note—This is the first song suggested by a reader/listener—Nancy Fred.  You are all invited to make requests.  We are looking for the eclectic, unusual, or forgotten across genres and styles.  Dig into your memories and dust off the moldy oldies!

Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay may be the ultimate chill song.  It was co-written by blues and soul singer Otis Redding and guitarist Steve Cropper of Booker T and the MGs It was recorded by Redding twice in 1967, including once just days before his death in a plane crash. The song was released on Stax Record’s Volt label in 1968, becoming the first posthumous single to top the charts in the U.S.

Redding was 26 when he recoded the final version of the song at Stax’s Memphis studio and was a rapidly rising star.  Blusier than most Soul singers, he never quite fit it with the Mo Town Sound or highly produced music from Philadelphia and Mussel Shoals.  He got a boost in crossover appeal with hip young White audiences when he headlined at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and the film of his electric performance boosted it further.

Ottis Redding was a dynamic live performer.

Redding began scribbling notes for Dock of the Bay while on tour in the months after that show.  Later he collaborated with Cooper while they were staying with their friend, Earl “Speedo” Simms, on a houseboat in Sausalito, California.  Redding was searching for a new sound quite different than his usual hard charging blues.  Stax executives feared that the departure would damage the label’s reputation.  Finally in the studio Coopers also produced the recording sessions with Booker T. and the MGs as the backup band.  The main track was laid down in November of ’67 with additional dubbing in December.

Otis returned to touring with plans to make additional changes to the recording—the sounds of the water in San Francisco Bay and seagulls—later.  On December 10 he was flying into Madison, Wisconsin in a fog when the small twin engine Beechcraft H18 he was in crashed into Lake Monona.  He died with four members of the band Bar Keys, their valet, and the pilot.

The posthumous The Dock of the Bay album matched the wild success of the single peaking at #4 on the Album Charts.  It has never gone out of circulation.

Back in Memphis Cooper dubbed the sounds that Redding wanted.  The single was released on January 8, 1968 less than three weeks after his funeral in his home town of Macon, Georgia.  The song shot to number one on the R&B charts in early 1968 and in March, topped the pop charts for four weeks.  It went on to win two Grammy Awards—Best R&B Song and Best Male R&B Vocal Performance.  The Dock of the Bay was ranked twenty-eighth on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.  Redding was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994, and in 1999 he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.  The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included three Redding recordings, Shake, Sittin' On The Dock of the Bay, and Try a Little Tenderness, on its list 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll,

Don Ameche and Tyrone Power Never Got Cast in this Movie

You may have noticed that this is National Fire Protection Week.  The annual event is marked by news stories extolling the virtues of smoke alarms and family fire evacuation drills.  Your local fire station may host school field trips or an open house—maybe they will let you climb on an engine or even slide down a pole.  Ask and you will be told that this week was selected because the Great Chicago Fire broke out on October 8, 1871.

That fire was certainly memorable.  After breaking out in an immigrant south side neighborhood, winds whipped flames north and west across the sprawling city.  It burned for two days consuming 4 square miles, including the downtown business district, killing an estimate 200-300 and leaving 90,000 people homeless.  The fire originated in the O’Leary family barn (the house was spared being up wind) but neither the lady of the house or her cow had anything to do with it.  Apparently neighborhood layabouts set it off while shooting craps. 

Word of the fire spread rapidly across the country and within a week national publications were carrying first hand accounts and illustration of the carnage.  The city famously rose from the ashes, replacing its largely ramshackle wooden buildings with modern—and fire resistant—brick and stone.  In less than a decade the city had not only fully recovered, it had double again in size.

But the fire in Chicago was not the only conflagration that day.  After an extended long drought that covered the entire upper Midwest, a fast moving cold front drove intense winds before it.  Fires swept Holland and Manistee, Michigan and swaths of surrounding areas on the west shore of Lake Michigan.  More than 200 died when another fire consumed Port Huron, Michigan on the southern shores of Lake Huron.

As devastating as those fires were, they all paled compared to the great fire in Wisconsin’s North Woods centered on the lumber town of Peshtigo.  Despite tinder dry conditions, careless neglect sparked several fires in the area that had burned more or less unchecked for several days before the fire.  These fires were attributed to cinders from railroad locomotive smoke stacks, small heating and cooking fires left untended by hunters, farmers burning to clear brush or the tree tops stripped from logging operations.  Local experience was that these fires would burn themselves out or be extinguished by the early snows expected in the region by mid October.  The night before the big fire survivors reported seeing several small blazes on surrounding hills.

By the evening of the October 8 high winds were merging the fires, which began to move on broad fronts burning, among other things, the telegraph lines that Peshtigo and another dozen small towns could have used to signal for help.  By the time a wall of flame erupted over a ridge near town, the fire was roaring with unprecedented fury, moving at high speed directly on the town.  Residents had little time to gather possessions and attempt to flee before the town itself was engulfed.  By then the fire was traveling from tree-top to tree top creating its own cyclonic winds, including at least one “tornado of fire” witnessed by several survivors.  The firestorm fed itself creating internal winds of up to 80 miles an hour ripping the roofs of houses, blowing over barns, uprooting trees, and tossing a 1,000 lb. wagon like tumbleweed.

Before it was over the fire burned over 1.2 million acres.  Winds carried embers to both sides of the Peshtigo River and across Green Bay where it burned the Door Peninsula from Dykesville almost to Sturgeon Bay to the north.  Sixteen towns were totally destroyed.  In Peshtigo alone, 800 lives were lost.  The total death toll will never be known exactly because town records across the region were destroyed and whole families wiped out.   In addition hundreds of lumber workers, isolated small farmers, hunters and trappers were in the woods with no way to determine their fate.  Best estimates of the death toll range from 1,200 to over 2,000. 

Word of the Peshtigo fire and the other disasters in the north was overwhelmed by news from Chicago.  To this day the largest loss of life by fire in American history remains little known outside of Wisconsin and among fire historians. 

During World War II, however, the Army Air Force was aware of the historic firestorm.  It commissioned American and British scientists to study it to find ways of duplicating the firestorm through incendiary bombing.  The destruction of Dresden, Germany by fire storm, which took more lives than either of the atomic bombs used against Japan, was partly the result of that research.

Today a museum in Peshtigo commemorates the fire.  It has very few relics of the town—almost everything burned up except for one house freshly built of green lumber.  Among the few artifacts of the fire are the Tabernacle from the Catholic Church which was saved by survivor Father Peter Pernin by submersing it in the river, a melted can of peas, some fused ceramics, a chard piece of lumber from the surviving house, and artifacts recently dug up, including a Bible discovered opened to Psalms.

Despite the fact that conditions across the region were perfect for wide spread fire, that many eyewitness accounts of numerous fires burning for days around the town, and that the origin of the Chicago fire can be traced to the O’Leary barn, speculation that the fires had some common origin has gone on for years.  As early as 1883 there was speculation that the fires across the region might have been caused by impact of debris from the Comet Biela, which was observed to break up in its 1854 appearance.  The intersection of the projected route of the comet’s return in November 1872 was marked by an intense meteor shower. 

The 1985 book Mrs. O'Leary’s Comet: Cosmic Causes of the Great Chicago Fire by Mel Waskin revived that theory.  In 2007 Robert M. Wood published a scholarly article in the Journal of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics which calculated that gravitational pull of Jupiter when debris of the comet crossed its path may have accelerated the arrival of that debris by as much as a year.  Observations of “fire balls” falling from the sky in both the Peshtigo and Chicago fires might have actually been burning gasses from the dead comet.  Other experts remain skeptical of this theory.

One thing we know for sure.  Mrs. O’Leary’s innocent cow had a better press agent than the victims of the Peshtigo inferno. 

When Labor Awoke—Wisconsin Governor’s Overreach Set off a Firestorm

Note—Two years ago this week in the opening gambit of what turned out to be a tsunami of attacks on working people, labor, and democracy itself, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker also triggered a new people’s movement.  That movement would spread to other states—Ohio, Michigan, Indiana among others. 

A few months later the Occupy Movement would spread a people’s movement in the streets across the country.  Together these actions and these events dramatically changed the political and social conversation in the nation that had been almost completely dominated by the radical right and its Tea Party sock puppets.  The national media entranced by that shiny bauble, was slow to understand what was happening.  But in less than two years it was clear that the American people had rejected austerity, punishing the poor and working class, unrestrained looting by the wealthy and powerful, stripping government of every authority save that of closely regulating women’s bodies and life choices.  Barack Obama owes his re-election as much to this sea change as his vaunted organization or the disarray of the Right.

 Everything is not well.  Walker and the other Republican governors in the Rust Belt states backed by heavy majorities in their gerrymander legislatures generally were able to pass most of their draconian legislation over sustained protests.  Often the courts have blocked the worst of the provisions.  In fact the avalanche of horrible legislation was brought on by the Right’s realization that they might have only a short time to set their “reforms” in concrete before they are swept away.  That’s all that the paymaster behind them wanted anyway.

The left has hardly understood what has happened.  Many in the Occupy Movement seem perplexed and disappointed that their demands for radical and fundamental change seems to have translated into votes for Democrats who they find cowardly and hardly less creatures of the oligarchy than the Republicans.  And that is true as far as it goes.  But it was the people rising up and using the weapon of defense—the vote and using it in defiance of every plot and scheme to prevent them from exercising it.

Much more needs to be done.  Defense must shift to offense.  The battles must be fought on our terms, as the Chicago Teachers’ Strike last fall show.  We will need to take again to the streets.  And most importantly we will have to forge new organs, new organizations, new alliances that employ fresh ideas and tactics suitable for the age of Twitter and Facebook.

But history is will look back to what happened in the snows of Madison two years ago as the tipping point. 

What follows is my blog post exactly two years ago today, written as events were unfolding.  Let’s refresh our memories.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is a hero in his own mind.  He sees himself as a swashbuckling avenger taking down the “sacred cow” of public employee unionism.  Elected along with rabid Republican majorities in both houses of the state Legislature in the Tea Party Tsunami last November he believed he had a mandate for revolutionary change in a state with a long and proud Progressive tradition and a healthy Labor Movement.

Wisconsin, like many states, was undergoing a fiscal crisis as the Recession-that-will-not-die-no-matter-what-the-economists-say simultaneously sapped tax revenues and placed new demands on human services and safety net programs.  The crisis would have to be addressed.  Tax increases, like those just adopted in neighboring Illinois, were off the table, not even to be considered by tax allergic Republicans.  Every one knew big budget cuts were coming.  The question was who would get hit, and how bad.

Typically, Walker and the Republicans focused on social services and “entitlements”, seeing an opportunity to shrink government.  But Walker dared go further—he declared war on the state’s own employees and did it with strutting bravado.  His base eats that sort of thing up.  He may have even imagined that his actions could catapult him overnight from a nationally obscure freshman governor to a new hero of the Right.  Maybe he could leap over New Jersey Governor Chris Christie the darling get-tough executive, Sara Palin, or Michele Bachman to the top of red meat and hair-on-fire ranks.

Walker’s plan was nothing if not sweeping and radical.  He did not even bother to offer to meet with public employee unions.  He declared, there will be no negotiations.  Instead he advanced a plan that would slash or virtually eliminate public employee pensions and shift almost all of the cost of health insurance onto employees.  This was necessary, he said, to balance the budget without massive layoffs.  Because “rationalizing” the state’s work force would naturally reduce the number of workers needed any way, Walker decided to skip the hassle of negotiating changes in job descriptions, work loads, and conditions by stripping public employee unions of the right to bargain over any issues other than base salary.  He would also gut grievance procedures giving him and agency heads carte-blanche to ride roughshod over individual employees. The public employees were not just state employees either--they included county, municipal, school, and other local government workers.

The Governor sensed that his might not go over too well with government workers.  He attempted to split them by exempting local police and fire employees and State Patrolmen from the harshest provisions.  Some of those unions had actually foolishly supported his candidacy.  Besides, he had the feeling he might need that police protection.

In retrospect, I wonder if Gov. Walker wishes he had picked a better moment to announce his plan.  He picked the very day Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was being toppled by Cairo street demonstrators.  Maybe he thought it would get lost in the shuffle.  But he boldly stepped up to microphones and announced his sweeping plan.  He also declared that Republican majorities in both houses were sure to rapidly adopt the necessary legislation with out as much as disturbing a comma of his proposals.  Oh, and by the way, he said, if public employees dared protest or “cause disruptions” he was fully prepared to mobilize the National Guard.  In fact, he said, he had already consulted with Guard commanders about the possibility of deployment.

Threatening military action against his own employees before the fact may just have pushed the envelope a bit too far.  Word of the threat spread like wildfire.  The words were hardly out of his mouth before he was being compared to Mubarak and workers were planning their own demonstrations.

These days with Facebook, Twitter, and blogs it does not take long to organize a response.  Even before top labor leaders could call outraged news conferences, public workers were making their own plans to descend on the Capitol.

Yesterday, tens of thousands did just that surrounding the public spaces around the Capital and jamming the corridors inside.  Chants compared Walker to Mubarak and called for his ouster.  Many carried homemade signs say “I’m Not Afraid of the Guard.”  Hundreds of firefighters marched to join the demonstrators lending their support despite the preferential treatment that their union had received.  In Milwaukee thousands protested outside the Governor’s home and teachers walked off the job to join the protest causing some schools to close.  In Madison and elsewhere high school students walked out in support of their teachers.  Unionized private employer workers joined the fight as well.

Last night hundreds, led mostly by university teaching assistants and other staff, occupied the capital building over night demanding to be heard in public hearings being held.  Hundreds who signed up to speak at the hearing refused to leave until they were heard.  Shortly after 2 AM Republican legislators conducting the hearing left the Capitol by a side door to avoid being seen by the crowds.  Democrats kept the committee hearings in session all night as angry testimony continued.

Today the throngs around the Capitol have only grown.  Madison schools were officially closed due to a massive teacher sick-in.  Students from the nearby University of Wisconsin campus have been joined by high school and even middle school students supporting the workers.  Progressive, liberal, and radical organizations of all stripes and their members have joined a united stand against this naked power grab. 

Reports on the scene indicate that the mood of the crowds is buoyant and determined.  Everyone declares a willingness to stay “as long as necessary.”

The governor has been lying low, but issuing defiant statements.  So far he has called for no police action nor alerted the Guard.  Perhaps he realizes if he does so the powder keg might literally explode.

The nation is just now becoming dimly aware of what is happening.  The major media, as always barely aware of developments in “flyover” country have been slow to pick up the story.  That is beginning to change.  Workers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota—all states with huge blue collar communities—are keeping a close eye on developments as their own governors have been making noises similar to Walker.  This could spread rapidly if they make good on those noises.

It you are in Wisconsin today, or can get there, I urge you, drop what you are doing and find a protest to join.