“I’ve always been able to make money,” says Billie Sol Estes as he picks over a plate piled high with lasagna, chicken cacciatore, and spaghetti. “If I put my mind to it, I could make a million in the next thirty days.” That’s just the sort of talk that has gotten Billie Sol in trouble for the last thirty years, a third of which he has spent in prison. In the eyes of the law his talent lies in being able to make money a little too easily – by a variety of schemes and cons that have made his name a national synonym for “swindler.” I have already experienced, in a small way, Billie Sol’s skill at separating people from their money. When I asked to meet him, he imposed one condition: I had to take him and his grandkids to dinner at a restaurant of his choice. And that is how I came to be seated at the Olive Garden Italian Restaurant in Abilene with Billie Sol, his daughter Pam, two of his granddaughters, and a nephew named Kerry who is a hairdresser in Los Angeles.
The Democrat, after just a year in office, was concerned about potentially rising inflation. His administration set an informal but well-publicized target of having wage increases and price hikes match productivity increases. Meanwhile, Steelworkers’ bargaining over a contract with the nation’s steel companies was getting nowhere.
The administration intervened. It didn’t want a rerun of the 4-month steel strike of 1959 under GOP President Eisenhower. Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, a longtime union counsel, mediated the talks. The two sides reached agreement on March 31.
The pact, with ten of the nation’s 11 steel companies, called for an increase in fringe benefits worth 10 cents an hour in 1962, but no wage hikes that year. Then-AFL-CIO President George Meany said that in the pact, the union “settled on a wage increase figure somewhat less than the Steelworkers thought they would get.”
Kennedy praised the contract as “obviously non-inflationary” and said both the USW and the steel firms showed “industrial statesmanship of the highest order.” The agreement also implicitly said the companies would not raise prices, as that would be inflationary.
But on April 10, Roger Blough, CEO of U.S. Steel, the largest of the firms, with 25% of the market, met Kennedy in the Oval Office and told him the company was immediately raising prices by $6 a ton – and that other steel companies would follow. Six did. The 3.5% hike enraged the president. What he said in public was biting – but he was even more caustic in private.
In an April 11, 1962 press conference, Kennedy called the price hikes “a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest.” He criticized “a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility.” The execs had “utter contempt” for the U.S., Kennedy said.
In private, Kennedy added: “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it until now.” The line quickly became public.
“A muleskinner is a professional mule driver whose sole purpose was to keep the mules moving. The term ‘skinner’ is slang for someone who might ‘skin’ or outsmart a mule. Mules have a characteristic of being very stubborn so outsmarting them to make them move used skill, wit and a type of determination.”
Unknown Speaker: "A group of young people, mostly boys, we can determine the university student, were milling around the downtown area in Kent, where there is a collection of bars and night clubs, where most of the younger crowd frequent. At first they were simply milling around; not really unruly or disorderly. The crowd got larger, and then the violence broke out at about midnight."
Announcer: The place, Kent State University in Ohio. If you were there on May 4th, you would have seen a campus filled with Ohio National Guard units, called into quell student rioting, which began as a protest against the use of U.S. forces in Cambodia.
The guardsmen had been ordered onto the campus after the University's ROTC building had been burned to the ground in the second night of disruption by antiwar students.
So there you are, if a student, you're one of about 600 in a large grassy plain in the middle of campus. If you are a national guardsman, you are a part of the 100 on that same grassy plain. You would just disperse some students with teargas. Your rifle is loaded with real bullets. You stand side by side, walking up a hill. Suddenly a student throws a rock, then another. They are shouting. Then just as suddenly you turn to face the crowd, a skirmish line is formed. You lift your rifle and for about 30 seconds only, the sounds of shooting and screaming fill the air.
Apparently, Thomas Morton didn’t get the memo. The English businessman arrived in Massachusetts in 1624 with the Puritans, but he wasn’t exactly on board with the strict, insular, and pious society they had hoped to build for themselves. “He was very much a dandy and a playboy,” says William Heath, a retired professor from Mount Saint Mary’s University who has published extensively on the Puritans. Looking back, Morton and his neighbors were bound to butt heads sooner or later.
I haven’t been doing enough reading lately. It’s so easy to waste time in the evenings now with my unlimited phone plan and the Youtube, but I have ordered some books from the library for reading in the coming weeks:
Some books about local history and the Pine Bush (I am particularly interested in Paul Grodahl’s book for interviewing more of John Wolcott):
Mayor Erastus Corning : Albany icon, Albany enigma / [by Paul Grondahl].
Pine Bush : Albany’s last frontier / compiled and edited by Don Rittner.
Some homesteading/farming books:
Living with goats : everything you need to know to raise your own backyard herd / Margaret Hathaway ; photographs by Karl Schatz.
Storey’s illustrated breed guide to sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs / Carol Ekarius.
Been doing a lot of reading about large livestock, so I figure it’s good to learn now about smaller stock.
Now just to wait for these books to come in stock, and not forget about them while I wait. But once they are available, it’s just drive-thru at the library.
McNamara epitomized the hyper-rational executive who relied on numbers rather than sentiments, and who could apply his quantitative skills to any industry he turned them to. In 1960 he was named president of Ford, a position he held for only a few weeks before being tapped to join President Kennedy’s cabinet as secretary of defense.
As the Vietnam conflict escalated and the United States sent more troops, it became clear that this was a war of wills, not of territory. America’s strategy was to pound the Viet Cong to the negotiation table. The way to measure progress, therefore, was by the number of enemy killed. The body count was published daily in the newspapers. To the war’s supporters it was proof of progress; to critics, evidence of its immorality. The body count was the data point that defined an era.