The Sport of Kings

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         The Sport of Kings
Polo the sport of kings originated in Persia some 2000 years ago, and later spread to India and the rest of the world. The sport evolved as a training aid for mounted calvary. Polo revealed  the character of the players and their courage.  Players mounted on horses with mallets fought for a small ball which would lead to a victory goal at the end of the playing field.

Polo today remains pretty much as it always had. Trained horses,riders with a mallet chasing a small boll towards a goal. But remember I called this the "Sport of Kings?"
This year the Oak Brook Polo Club in Oak Brook, Illinois, traveled to Deli India to play polo, and visited many sites including the Taj Mahal. Also, The Polo Gold Cup series was played this year in Dubai at the Habtoor Polo Resort and Club in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

But polo is also played and enjoyed by people of more modest means. Polo is played here in Hawaii at two polo clubs. And I should note that the famous WWII General George Patton played polo here.

The Honolulu Polo Club is located at Waimanalo, one of the most beautiful spots on the island of Oahu. But this was not always so. Club President Allen Hoe told me that years ago if a car was stolen, it could often be found stripped and burned on what later became the polo playing field. The land is leased from the State of Hawaii as it is located on a flood plane and not considered valuable.

The Honolulu Polo Club boasts a covered seating area for members, and seating below for visitors. A converted shipping container houses tools,generator,and a restroom for women.There is also a tall booth reached by stairs for the public sound system. Across the field are the stables for the many horses.

Club President Allen Hoe was recently honored in the June 2017 edition of Players Edition of "Polo" magazine. The U.S. Polo Association presented the George S. Patton Jr. award to Allen Hoe in appreciation of his efforts to create opportunities for military members and their families to become involved in the sport of polo.

A combat medic in  the Vietnam War he is the recipient of the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and Combat Medics Badge. He is a lawyer, judge, and one of the founders of the Honolulu Polo Club. He has been training solders of the 25th Infantry Division in the rudiments of horsemanship and polo at famous Schofield Barracks. For all his work with veterans, the Department of the Army made him a Civilian Aide to the Secretary of the Army, which carries a three-star rank. And so the Honolulu Polo Club is being well led.    The gates at the Honolulu Polo Club open at 1/pm and the match begins at 3pm. Entry fee is only $5.00 but the fee is waved for military families and members.

When the British ruled India, the game of polo was divided into a  period of play called a  "chukka." A normal game consists of four chukkers, although sometimes five or even six are not unusual. Each chukker lasts just seven minutes, and a horn blasts warning that only 30 seconds of play remain until the sound of a bell ends play. This is so civilized. While the riders leave the field and mount fresh horses there is time to eat, drink and gossip.                                                                

A beautiful Sunday afternoon well spent with polo and friends, is something not to be missed when you are visiting Hawaii during the polo season.
                                                  Aloha
     Grant                                      

Witch Doctor

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           Witch Doctor
I met Neal last night. He was stopping here on his way to Seattle, where he hopes to sell his 48 foot sailboat. He said that he was from South Africa, but that he lived in Sidney Australia. He had just returned from spending several days in Tahiti and Bora Bora. While talking with him he seemed pleased that I knew so very much about South Africa. We talked about the Transvaal and the Boer War. I asked him to tell me a story about South Africa.

He said that the factory where he worked  employed members of the Zulu tribe. One day a very delicate precision instrument was stolen. It was used to measure the thickness of paint. In order to have it returned he went to see the local witch doctor.

He stated the problem of the theft and ask what he could to about it. The witch doctor said that for 50 Rand (currency) he could have it returned in one month. And the instrument would be returned for 100 Rand in one week. But if he wanted it returned in one day it would cost 150 Rand. Neal needed the instrument and agreed to pay the 150 Rand.

The following day the Witch doctor arrived dressed in all of his fancy dress. He asked that all the workers be brought together. He then began to dance around,looking at each man and throwing some powder about. Then he departed and the men went back to work. The following morning behind a box on Neal's desk was the missing instrument.

     Aloha
     Grant

Down and Dirty

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          Down and Dirty
When I was a boy we played a game called "Marbles." We didn't invent the game, and I am sure that some sort of a game played by boys in the dirt with marbles, has been played for centuries,if not thousands of years.

All the equipment we needed was a stick, a smooth patch of dirt, and a bag of marbles. Using the stick a circle was drawn in the dirt, and each boy would put an equal number of marbles deep inside the circle. The object of the game was to hit the marbles out of the the circle and  became the property of the shooter. Each boy had a large size marble or boulder which was his shooter. The boy whose turn it was, kneeled in the dirt and took aim. The shooter was driven by the thumb of your hand and released by the index finger. Just like releasing a spring. It was a game that even poor boys could play.

I doubt that this game is played by boys today. Technology sometimes kills even simple fun. I record this game so that it will be remembered, and not lost to the dust of history.

     Aloha
     Grant

Navajo Notes

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            Navajo Notes
The Navajo Nation Police Department patrols approximately 27,000 square miles of the Navajo Nation. The police responds to over 200,000 calls for service and conducts over 25,000 arrests every year. This is a huge amount of work for approximately 200 officers on patrol duty.
The Navajo Nation's Department of Corrections is in need of 75 facilities. The average daily population is roughly 199 individuals per day at the six facilities.
Major crimes like murder is handled by the F.B.I. "Navajo Times" Thursday,April27, 2017.
Much of what I know about the Navajo people  has come from the detective novels of Tony Hillerman, which all take place on the reservation.

The Navajo Nation is about the size of West Virginia. It is located primarily in Arizona, but also extends into Utah and in  New Mexico. In addition there is much Navajo country in New Mexico which is outside the nation.

The Navajo call themselves "Dine"-"The People." They have been living there for more than four hundred years. But no discussion of the Navajo would be complete without telling of the terrible trials they were forced to endure.

In 1863 the U.S. Army under the command of Colonel Kit Carson, began a systematic campaign of destroying all means of livelihood of the Navaho. Thousands of sheep and livestock were slaughtered, and crops burned.

The winter of 1863 and faced with starvation, thousands of Navajo surrendered to a forced removal policy known as the "Long Walk."  More than 9,000 Navajo walked more than 300 miles to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, to a reservation called Bosque Redondo. In 1868 and after many hardships, the Navajo under treaty were allowed to return to their homelands.      

The focus of the Navajo economy, culture and weaving is the the Churro breed of sheep. This breed was the first breed of domesticated sheep imported by the Spanish explorers. During the 1930s and 1940s the federal government called for the reduction of the sheep on Navajo land.Tens of thousands of sheep were killed. By the 1970s fewer than 450 Churro sheep were left. Today there are organizations that promote the restoration and development of the Churro sheep. The wool is highly valued by hand spinners and weavers.

The Navajo Nation is divided into sections like townships, called chapters. Each chapter hosts a clan group, often a house called a hogan surrounded by house trailers. These clusters are to be found all across the wide space of the Nation.

There is a story of how a group of white men were trying to build a Navajo hogan but they were undecided  how many sides the building  would require. A Navajo man seated nearby watching them,left and returned giving them a stop sign!

One important story concerning the Navajo is the newly de-classified role played by  Navajo code talkers in the Pacific during World War II. All six U.S. Marine Divisions used Navajo speaking code talkers which the Japanese were unable to break. The town of Kayenta on the reservation has a small museum located in a fast food restaurant run by the son of one of the famous code talkers.

The reservation has its share of problems,   alcoholism, domestic abuse, and unemployment. And to make matters worse hills of tailings from uranium mines  dot some of the landscape. Children playing in these tailings debris are poisoned. The Federal Government built a hospital and surrounding outbuildings only to find out that the well water was poisoned by uranium. The hospital remains empty.

One source of income for the Navajo has been a coal mine. Coals sent by rail to Laughlin, Nevada where several casinos are located. But now with the emphasis on cleaner forms of energy such as solar and natural gas, I wonder what will happen to this source of income, and the employment of a thousand miners.

In reading the novels of Tony Hillman, there is frequent mention of Navajo tacos.A Navajo taco is nothing like its cousin. The  Navajo taco is only made from Blue Bird flour grown in Colorado. The flour provides greater elasticity, which creates a high rim around the taco. The taco is then covered with the usual fixings. A Navajo taco is the size of a dinner plate and will feed two people easily.

The Navajo are famous for their hand loomed wool blankets, and beautiful silver jewelry. Recordings of Navajo flute music are hauntingly beautiful. I have a hand-crafted cedar flute and a song book. The flute is called a"Love Flute," as young men play the flute when courting. I find that there is a steep learning curve.

As I write these sentences the television reports that temperatures in the Southwest are 117 to 120 degrees. I pity the Navajo, without even a tree for shade.

    Aloha
    Grant    

The Goldwater Rule

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         The Goldwater Rule
The year 1964 was a big one for me. I had just graduated from the University of Michigan, and landed my first teaching job. I was assigned to teach American government and history to 47 senior students. This was also a presidential election year. The incumbent President Johnson who had been J.F.Kennedy's Vice President, was being challenged by the Republican  Senator Barry Goldwater.

The election took place on Tuesday November 3. I passed out an outline map of the U.S. and urged students to fill in each state as  soon as the results were known.

I should not have even bothered, as this election is the most lop-sided election in history. Johnson received 90.3 percent of the popular vote and Goldwater 9.7 percent.
Johnson carried 44 of the 50 states.

In addition to Goldwater's extreme conservative views, there was another factor which might have helped to cause him defeat. That year, "Fact" magazine published a petition signed by more than a thousand psychiatrists declaring that Goldwater was "psychologically unfit" to be President. Goldwater won a libel suit against the magazine.

This leads us to the erratic behavior of President Trump. Serious questions have been raised about his mental health and his control of nuclear weapons. We will just have to wait and see if this "Goldwater rule will be ignored. For more information see The New Yorker magazine May 22, 2017.

Also, I want to mention that two of my senior students that year, Vince Larocca and Bob Perry, following graduation enlisted in the Army, and were later killed in Vietnam.

    Aloha
    Grant

Buck v. Bell

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             Buck v. Bell

The U.S. Supreme Court has sometimes made some very bad rulings. Readers may remember for instance Dred Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu v. United States, as prime examples. But one terrible ruling which is seldom mentioned is Buck v. Bell.

When Charles Darwin wrote about evolution and the survival of the fittest, he had no notion of what would follow. The question asked was "If this was true in the animal kingdom,must it also be true of humans as well?"The science of human improvement developed into an intellectual movement called "eugenics" from the Greek "eu" for "good" and "genes" for born. The science for improving stock.

The eugenics movement found support from the medical profession, lawyers, and journalists. Women supported the movement.
Magazines carried stories about eugenics. The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald even wrote a playful song about eugenics.

All of this took place as the Immigration Act of 1924 favored immigrants from Northern Europe and greatly reduced the number of Jews and Italians. The fear was that they would dilute our superior gene pool.

Some state institutions were already sterilizing inmates, but the State of Virginia hesitated until sterilization was proven to be lawful. A test case was needed. For the sake of brevity here, the lower courts rulings led to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The poor unlucky person for this test case was Carrie Buck, a seventeen year old girl who had born a child out of wedlock. She had been raped by the nephew of the couple she had worked for. They wanted her out of the way and in an institution where her mother was, being judged as "feeble minded." Carrie was judged a a moron and as such was placed in the same institution for epileptics and feeble-minded. Where her mother was located. Evidence of her grades in school were average and that she was promoted every year until the sixth grade when she became employed in housework. These facts never were heard in court.

Room does not permit me to relate all the details of the case but I will have to say something about the Supreme Court at that time. The Chief Justice was William Howard Taft, who had once served as President. Another well-known justice was Louis Bandeis,but the one outstanding member of the court was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Homes was a Boston Brahmin-a member of the most rarefied social caste. His father father was a doctor and had written the famous poem "Old Ironsides," credited to saving the USS Constitution from being scrapped. Holmes attended Harvard, and through family connections, including Teddy Roosevelt, was appointed to the Supreme Court.

Holmes was admired for his wisdom and his service during the Civil War. Praise was showered upon him. But his public persona was far different from his private one.

Holmes's support for eugenics was notable for the extremity of his views. He was not a supporter of causes. He was indifferent to laws concerning child labor, antitrust laws, and other progressive goals.

As Wold War I approached Holmes supported the war, and wrote the majority opinion, upholding the ten year conviction of E  gene V. Debs, a socialist leader for giving an antiwar, anti draft speech.

Holmes wrote the majority opinion for the court declaring that Carrie Buck should be sterilized-and that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." The one dissent to the ruling came from Pierce Butler, and he wrote no dissenting opinion.

Virginia had won the case. Carrie was sterilized, as were others. She was released from the colony, later was twice married and found that she could not conceive and discovered what she thought was for an appendix operation. Her later life was one of hardship, but people who knew her said that she was highly intelligent and loved reading the daily paper, and doing crossword puzzles.

The effect of the court's ruling was felt beyond the United States. Sweden,Norway, Iceland,Estonia, and of course Germany. Following the defeat of the Nazis, and the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the defense cited Buck v, Bell arguing that the sterilizing was proper. Estimates are that Nazi leaders sterilized 375,000 people.    

Buck v. Bell is little remembered today and has never been over-turned. Of all the cases I learned about in college, this was never discussed. And it is one of the great miscarriages of justice. The pendulum has swung against eugenic sterilization, but will it swing back?

I owe a huge debt to Adam Cohen, author of
"Imbeciles, The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck." Penguin Books 2016.

     Aloha
     Grant

Nascar 101

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           NASCAR 101
I never paid much attention to NASCAR races. I figured they were a bunch of Hillbillies dressed in overalls, chugging beer while being surrounded by pretty girls with low-cut blouses, watching cars go rapidly around a track.

The reality of NASCAR is much different. Teena and I listened as her cousin Don Collins explained this racing world to us. We were watching a race at Talladega,Alabama. The oval track he explained, is two and a -half long, and the race cars run at speeds of 195 to 212 miles an hour for a distance of 500 miles. Each car has a spotter located high in the grandstands connected to the driver by a radio. The spotters job is to tell the driver if the way to the left of the car is open or to the right, so that he can move forward. This is because the driver's head is only able to move slightly, and he is unable to see either right or left without his spotter.

The driver is enclosed in a cage of steel bars for protection, and steel panels on each sides of the car. Also, cool air is fed to the driver from behind his seat. As Don continued to explain, I began to wonder about getting the driver out of the car as the only entry and exit is through the window on the driver's side. This is so different than the Formula One cars where the driver sit upright and exposed.

Don told us that there are two flaps to the rear of the driver which like flaps on an airplane, help to prevent the car from turning over.

One other very interesting fact we learned   was that a piece of paper on the track and stuck to the air intake of the car must be removed, because if not, the engine will overheat and be ruined. Another driver on the same team will pull in front of the affected car and create a draft which will cause the paper to fly away.

In the course of the 500 mile race there are frequent pit stops for the car, not the driver. The pit crew in seven seconds change tires, pour in 20 gallons of fuel, and pull away one of the plastic windshields, revealing a clear one underneath. And away goes the car.

I must admit that the race can get boring at times, it is after all 500 miles on a two and-a-half mile track. But there are crashes. Don said that near the end of the race there are often crashes, some hitting the 15 degree wall, others spinning out of control, or flipping upside down. When that happens the race stops, as the cars with their drivers are removed. Then the race resumes. Pretty damn exciting.

Thanks to Don's teaching we now have a better understanding of what NASCAR is all about. As for me in order to become a fan I already have a pretty girl, all I need now is a cold beer.

     Aloha
     Grant