Category: President Carter

No one at the public radio station warned Phoebe Hoss not to read the f-word. She’s 84, after all, with white hair and lovely manners. Perhaps the interviewer thought it unnecessary. Never mind, she read it anyway, although you didn’t hear it if you were listening, thanks to some sound engineer.

Flying from the lips of her then 9 year-old son as he looks for a weapon to attack his friends, the f-word appears repeatedly in the opening of her book, All Eyes:A Mother’s Struggle to Save Her Schizophrenic Son.

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If bound and published, the stories of the early part of my parents’ marriage might be titled “Tales of the Great Depression.” Like the dreams of most people, theirs were thrown to the wind when the economy fell apart.

The crash of 1929 cost my mother her scholarship to a Chicago conservatory, and she went home to Alabama a year short of graduation. “If I hadn’t met your daddy, I’d have starved to death,” she liked to say. She had been living in a boarding house and wringing out a living teaching piano lessons when someone fixed her up with a young pharmacist from Georgia.

Not that pharmacy was his first choice. Daddy had dreamed of a career in professional baseball, and he would have much preferred the outfield to standing behind the counter in his father’s store. But the economy dictated a practical profession, one to which he turned out to be well-suited.

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Hillary has spoken and it is good.

Senator Clinton’s speech Tuesday night to assembled Democrats and watchers around the nation and the world was superb. The historian Michael Beschloss said it was the best he’d heard her give.

Like a lot of Democrats, I was holding my breath.

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