I grew up in upstate New York in a small town called Port Crane, which lay along the once burgeoning Chenango Canal. I spent many youthful hours in another stop on that ancient canal system, the fire station in Port Dickinson, NY, which my grandfather established.
Both settlements lie along the Chenango River in Broome County. Those sepia tones of my youth illuminated much simpler times. It was a Reader’s Digest time.
I later joined the Port Crane Fire Department the summer before my senior year in high school in 1967. There I fought huge fires that first year. I fell through floors and knelt in burning rooms waiting for water. I heard people scream in the smoke and flames while we waited for the water to fill the hoses and the ladders to climb the house.
We always listened to our fire chief, we never had a man injured and he always got us off a roof or a ladder just in time.
One night we covered the holes in the roof of a fire-damaged home with plastic and covered the windows with plywood, illuminated by the chief’s headlights in the snow flurries. The chief was a compassionate conservative who taught me the value of community service. I dodged some major bullets fighting fires, then I moved away.
While at UCLA, years later, I decided to join the police. My first call out of the academy with that first partner concerned a fellow who was shooting a rifle from his front porch – at us, as we drove by. So we took cover, called for gas, eventually took the guy down and I was sent into the backyard to search for the suspect’s brother-in-law’s thumb – which I found with my flashlight and we rushed it to the receiving hospital.
I had officially dodged my first few police bullets – more would come.
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Imagine this if you will. When I arrived at that storied police academy some 70 years ago, where I began that fabulous first-day doing push-ups in my blazer and tie, the Los Angeles mayor, Sam Yorty, was a Republican, and Ronald Reagan was governor. That’s the real Ronald Reagan, not the imaginary guy Neil Wetherbee was recently waxing poetic about being so easy-going and soft on communism and all.
Republicans, Los Angeles. Those days are long gone.
Los Angeles was crazy in the ’70s and soon I was a training officer myself, teaching other rookies how to act as cops after their academy days. There were major shootouts. Riots, it seemed, somewhere, every few days. Bank robberies used to roll out of the radio three or four at a time on some days. Sometimes you’d get the call. We’d handle 28 calls in 8 hours.
When I arrived, California was that land of sun-drenched golden opportunity I heard on Beach Boys songs. Today, California is ruled by far-left fops and porn hustling ne’er-do-wells.
It has become a foreign land inside America where non-citizens are given the vote and free gummint monies, criminals are coddled, and where companies and hard working citizens alike are fleeing that pestilential hell hole fraught with the third world diseases like cholera which sweep through the vast sidewalk and front yard homeless encampments like a williwaw.
California’s hillsides and forests burn, not because of Biden’s wild fictive tommyrot about global warming, but because of abysmally poor land and forest management due to the Green’s huge money pipe into Sacramento and the topsy turvy belief that a snag of any kind must be left in place and never turned into a cabinet, a drawer, removed or burned.
You know, what our Democrats want our New Hampshire to resemble.
Eventually, I retired due to severe injuries and made my way to New Hampshire, where I found a small but nice split level ranch on six acres with a private spring-fed brook, luckily, because I was the only house on the road with a 138 foot deep artesian well for a fantastic price deep in the 1989 real estate collapse.
If the brook is running, I reckoned, there’ll be water in the well. I had dodged another of my bullets.
Recently, with the fantastic work completed last spring by our Republicans in New Hampshire’s House and Senate, I, and I should add we, collectively, have dodged so many more Democrat bullets: CRT, tax increases, defunding cops, a sales tax, assaults on our rights to bear arms, vast increases to the dole, idiocy and the insanity they habitually display in articles and letters.
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day. I would not exchange my home in the woods, for all of the cities so bright.
