I was doing my early morning search for more information on the Nequa crew and hit on a great site. The site url is http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/   It is a site where newspapers that have been digitized are available and better yet you can type in a persons name and it will search for the name in the newspapers that have been digitized. So I put in A. O. Grigsby and then spent a couple of hours looking through the notations that have been found by the search system. A lot of the items I have already seen. But there were two real, real interesting notations.
    In 1892  Mr. and Mrs A.O. Grigsby are listed as members of the welcoming committee for the Inauguration of the Governor of Kansas. I wasn’t surprised that a political operative with Populist connections would be involved in that Inauguration as it was for the Populist Governor that had been elected.
    What made this surprising is the fact that I had found NO notation of there being a new Mrs. A. O. Grigsby after the death of Mrs. A. O. Grigsby in Hubbard county.  I spent today at the National Archives looking for marriage licenses. didn’t find any so the story  takes a new turn and might just come out the way I predicted. No I will not reveal the prediction until the book comes out.

 

    The second notation appeared in the St. Paul Daily Globe on Novenber 11, 1888. I copied it out of the newspaper so you can read the original.

    Now for those of us who have always been happy in the middle of the road doing what the Republicans say or the Democrats suggest, the above newspaper item doesn’t mean much. It is just a meeting to commemorate the death of some men with principals  in Chicago. But the fact that these men were asking for an eight hour work day.  Their Labor Unions were calling for a boycott. The powers that ruled were afraid that they would lose a little money, so it all ended with violence and people getting killed and eight men being hung, (actually they choked to death because the nooses were loose and so the usual breaking of the neck could not take place, they swung until they choked to death, a very gruesome way to die, according to the witnesses.)  They were labeled Anarchists. They did not follow the Republican or Democrat party line. Thus, Judicial Murder.

   So that is the reason for this “Festival of Sorrow”at which A. O. Grigsby is listed as one of the speakers.

    I first learned a little about the Haymarket Affair while at a conference of the  National Association of Gravestone Studies. They had their conference in Chicago which I attended.  We toured cemeteries in Chicago and one was the cemetery where Emma Goldman and some other nefarious characters were buried. The first thing that the guide told us was that NO cemetery in Chicago would accept the bodies of  the men who were hanged as Anarchists responsible for the Haymarket riots. Finally the German Waldheim Cemetery allowed the burial of these men. There is a  Haymarket Martyrs' Monument in the center of where these men are buried, which has been placed on the National Historical Monument list. The dead men were pardoned.
    One of the men on the Gravestone Association tour was the grandchild of one of the Haymarket Riot martyrs. His grandfathers envolvement was that he printed circulars to announce the protest. Seems strange that printing a poster could get you hung by the Police.

In NEQUA I am reading about the Ice King, which is frozen in the ice near the north pole. The weather here in Kansas City has been perfect for providing a background for this chapter.

When it snows I just stay in, except for keeping a hole open in the fish pond. No reason to drive out the driveway and mix with the loonies sliding to work. (Incidentally there is a piece of Canadian money called a loonie.)

In the book there are several very creative endeavors undertaken by some of the crew of the Ice King while they are stuck in the ice.  The dialogue reminded me of my Swede relatives talking about a fellow relative who seems to have a little bit more creativity than the rest of us. In a half whisper, under their breathe, they say “he’s real sharp,” to describe a young person with a little bit of their creativity showing.

Personally I thought that probably the young person has a little bit better ability to focus their attention than most people. Maybe their retention of previous situations is superior. It could be they have developed their ability to recall a previous similar situations and with some minor readjustment they can use the old answer to solve the present problem.

It seemed to me that usually there is a lot of luck involved with real creative solutions. At times it seemed that the usual intellectual answers  were rejected with perhaps a cessation of the human involvement, a little spaced out glazed look in the eyes, a seemingly brief period of silent prayer. I even concluded that there was a little repartee with the higher sources. My relatives always came down on the side of  “sharpness” which in my opinion obfuscates the actuality of what creativity, true creativity really is.

The two most creative persons on board the ICE KING, other than Jack Adams are Scandinavian. Maybe there is some genetic answer.

Every book needs a front cover so I started working out some ideas and then I remembered the guy  who put the animation and sound on a political web site that I own. When you click on www.Taxhog.com , you hear, “Here Pig Pig, Here Pig Pig, Souuee Souuee”

The guy who did this is Joey, a very interesting guy. Joey earned  a degree from a college in central Kansas seven miles north of where Dr. T. A. H. Lowe started practicing medicine. Joey moved to Kansas City. He found a job with the Public Library.

I first met Joey while doing some political harassment of guys who think that widows and lower economic households should pay for athletic teams.  Major league ball teams who pay players millions of dollars to chase a ball or run around with a ball and yet they expect that the taxpayers should pay for box seats for good ol boys to swill expensive booze while “watching” millionaire ball players play games.  They  want taxes to upgrade the stadiums where they earn their money. I disagreed and I met some other guys who also disagreed. We successfully stopped several tax votes to collect and transfer MILLIONS to teams in Kansas City. It is amazing what a few internet sites like  www.TaxHog.com  can do before an election.  Joey helped us out.

                                                 This is one of his starts on the cover

Next thing I knew Joey was married, had a couple of kids and had moved on to a better paying job in another city.  He was still doing I.T. stuff and following his first love when not working.  He would rather be painting  paintings. Anyhow I ran him down and asked if he would be interested in creating a front and back cover for a book project I was going to do. I sent him a quick drawing I had done, which was to be a guidance image for getting started on this book cover.

Well he is off to a great start and is planning on showing  various stages of development on his web page. So if you want to see how an art project starts and progresses you should check out his personal website.