4/20/24
Newsletter #586
The Crack of Dawn
So far, the previously enthusiastic Trump-supporting, parrot saving, guy on the corner whose flagpole was blown over, which he fixed, has not put his flags back up. For a few weeks. Is he deliberating? One of his parrots was out on a perch on the screened-in porch and whistled as I went by. Not at me, I don’t think.
Across the street another house proudly flies, “God, Guns & Trump.” This neighborhood also has a nutty liberal named Larry, a retired auto worker, with a big American flag, a handwritten sign taped to his front porch reading, “Trump is toxic,” a peace sign made of a paper plate bisected with strips of red electrical tape, a lawn sign of a donkey that says, “Vote Democrat” (which I gave him), and a Ukrainian flag. Otherwise, nobody has any signs up.
The houses across from the turtle pond used to all have political signs; now none of them do. I have seen several turtles a couple of times in the turtle pond, on the logs right where they’re supposed to be. Big birds like swans and geese pick on the little turtles. There can be twenty turtles sunning themselves on a log, and if I clap my hands, they’ll all jump into the water.
New Idea:
I’ve run into this same disquieting situation twice in my life regarding the letters of historically important people left in the hands of seemingly the wrong people. Let me explain. In the late 1990s when the internet first arrived, I started a website, beckerfilms.com, which I’ve kept up since 1998. This was the same time when I was writing and rewriting my script, Devil Dogs: The Battle of Belleau Wood, which I posted on my site, as it is now. "THE BATTLE OF BELLEAU WOOD" (beckerfilms.com) In any case, I was contacted by a man who explained that he was a New York fireman, he really enjoyed my script, and his wife was the daughter of my lead character, Dan Daly’s, sister, with whom he presently lived in NYC. And she had possession of all of her late mother’s correspondence, including letters from Dan Daly.
Let me back up. I did a lot of research for that script. I found damn little to nothing on written about Dan Daly. Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly. “Fighting” Dan Daly. His nickname was “Fighting.” He is one of the United States Marine Corps’ greatest heroes. Daly is the most-decorated enlisted marine of all-time. Two Medals of Honor before he went into his most famous and awesome battle, America’s first entry into World War I, the Battle of Belleau Wood. There isn’t a single book on Dan Daly. There are references to him in many books, but he has no book of his own, and little is known of him beyond the record. The most information that I was able to find was a long article in Leatherneck Magazine, the magazine of the U.S. Marine Corps. Otherwise, there was only his military record.
And this woman, the fireman’s wife, said that in Daly’s sister’s will, it states that her letters should never be published, including Daly’s letters to her. I don’t even like writing about this. I had a long enough correspondence with the fireman for me to believe that his wife really had these letters that she wouldn’t let me, or anyone else see. I honestly pleaded with the guy, “You don’t have to send them to me, send them to the Marine Corps Historical Society.” No way. I gave up.
Anyway, to finish this horrible story, this exact same kind of thing happened again. A friend said to me one day, “Have you ever heard of Harriet Quimby?” Oddly, I hadn’t. But he told me about her and I looked her up – Harriet Quimby - Wikipedia I bought the one book I could find, a children’s book called, Brave Harriet by Marisa Moss, and watched a PBS Nova about her and now I think Harriet Quimby was one of the coolest people who ever lived. And incredibly cute. She was the first woman in America to get a pilot’s license. She was also the first woman to cross the English Channel on April 16, 1912, the day after the Titanic sunk, so nobody paid any attention.
Look at her! I love her. That photograph is from 1911. Harriet Quimby actually wrote seven screenplays for some of D. W. Griffith’s earliest films, all from 1911.
This is a late photograph is of her and her French Bleriot 50 monoplane, in which she died on July 1, 1912.
Anyway . . . It turns out that Harriet Quimby was from Michigan. Apparently, she kept up a lively postal correspondence with her best friend here in Michigan, even though Harriet moved to California. Her friend in Michigan died and left her worldly goods to her son, known as Crazy Dave. I met Crazy Dave twice, and we did speak of these letters. There was no way he was going to let me or anyone else ever look at them. Not even copies. These letters were the key to Dave’s success. He was going to make a spectacular movie out of them. He had never made any movies, but he assured me that he would eventually make this one. Not that I doubted him, but I could see why they called him Crazy Dave. That was years ago, I’ve never seen him again and that’s fine.
However, I have wondered about the letters of Dan Daly and Harriet Quimby over the years. Both of them are individuals who were exemplary, historically important, and left very little record of themselves, and kind of didn’t get their due.
Harriet Quimby was great! She’s so cute. They even issued a stamp of her.
.
Through Chris Dinnan.
We need heroes like Harriet Quimby.