By Tom Kimmel
I am pleased to state that the local police persons are earning their keep these days. They had a vulture hit a vehicle and a vehicle hit a deer and, most of all, the BS-OT Police handled 59 calls the week of July 6. Those of my column readers will remember several years ago, during one of the reoccurring tax renewal votes, my questioning about why us honest taxpayers here in the Village and the surrounding Oronoko Township were being asked to pay a million dollars per year for this constabulary service when most of what we knew they were doing was by observing the police cars pulling over motorists and bothering them. I may have said something about the make and model of the vehicles involved in this police action and their reports as irrelevant information that gave no real information and merely bothered some of us. Anyhow, I now all the more appreciate the work of Melodie Wright in composing this report for the paper, feeling responsible for putting her through this added task. You will notice that I have matured a bit and no longer complain about the million dollars a year.
You can check the July 15 issue of this fine paper. They handled “one incorrigible” and “four civil /family disputes.” I wonder what the incorrigible person was doing, but really do not want to know because I assume that they keep doing it over and over which, I can only also assume, irritates the police persons. The family disputes are the most dangerous as well as the least psychologically satisfying type of police work there is. It is in this work that most of the police get shot. I can also assume domestic police work is the most important as any time there is a homicide one or the other of the spouses is the prime suspect. The worst thing about these disputes is that minor children are often around—in fact they may be the only innocent people involved—and growing up is difficult enough without having to endure the stress of the yelling and screaming and hitting.
I am slowly catching up here, and so, referring to the Looking Back in the August 5 issue under 113 years ago I notice that George T. Kimmel has resigned his position with the Kawneer Company of Niles. As I vaguely recall, Kawneer was in the steel door frame business for office and commercial buildings. They may have done other things, but I was not around then to find out. At one time Niles was full of light industry—National Standard making tire bead wire at 300,000 psi tensile strength, which is similar to piano wire, Simplicity making tissue paper patterns for sewing clothes at home, Tyler for making commercial grocery store chest refrigerators and freezers, the French paper mill for making stationary, and we must not forget the mushroom factory on Third Street that turned composted horse manure into mushrooms. Most of these businesses did not last past the third generation as that is about when the fire went out of the belly, causing investment in new modern facilities to falter and tight management to end.
There was even a large steam locomotive repair operation complete with a round house, that still exists but not functioning as anything to do with railroads. We now have some smaller dynamic industries, such as Niles Precision on Fort Street, currently owned and managed by one of my cousins. My grandfather did not become George Kimmel Senior until 1917 when my father—Junior—was born and that tradition has continued until my poor grandson, such a bright and innocent little person that he is, is now labelled number V.
I do not know for certain when my Grandparents were married, but my Aunt Mary Jane was born in 1912—the same year as Loris Sherburn and several other luminaries and she spent her life keeping her birthday and her parents’ wedding day widely separated making it more difficult for the local gossips to have something more to gossip about. I do know that my grandfather was very poor and thus when he and Martha Boone decided to get married he had to go to Detroit to work for a month to earn money for the wedding, and then when he took the train back to town he met several of his cousins at the local bar and they kept encouraging him to drink a little more so that he could make more political speeches, to everyone’s great entertainment, such that they kept passing the hat and asking for more speeches. When word finally came back to Martha, who was living then at the Shaker Farm with her parents, she rapidly went to the barn and hooked up the horse to the buggy and drove into town to unceremoniously drag my grandfather out of the bar. By then it was a little too late as the money had been spent and so he had to go back to Detroit for another month before they could marry. He could get a job anywhere as he was a good talker and a pleasant person and always had a good job all through the Depression and that facility along with desperation explains him working for Kawneer for a while and then leaving them.
My research assistant found out why he was so poor by finding part of a handwritten history of the Kimmel family written by Suzie Mars, who was my grandfather’s cousin, ten years older. If anyone has the other part, the first ten pages of this essay, we would really appreciate it. The one thing that really stands out about life in pioneer times is the amount of death in this time before vaccines and antibiotics and good medical care. Mothers died in childbirth, children died of infectious diseases, adults died of tuberculosis and my great-great-grandfather Samuel Kimmel (1803-1854) died of typhoid fever when my great-grandfather was twelve years old. Samuel’s second wife had used the opportunity to clean the house out of the family silver and moved to the middle of Illinois where she had family. The Kimmel family was so destitute that the children were farmed out to various local families and my great-grandfather George Henry Kimmel (1842-1913) went to the Stemm family and that is doubtless how he met his first wife, Ally Stemm, who died of an infectious disease while assisting a neighboring family with care of their children was also stricken with the disease. She is buried over in Union Cemetery just south of Hinchman.
And now a brief return to current events in our town. You can tell that it is a slow news week when the most exciting thing going on was the paving of Main Street by applying a single seal. I had planned on a long disquisition on the subject of single seals and double seals until I figured out that I did not know enough. In reality, the writer does not have to know much about the subject at hand, but they had better be certain that they know more than any of the readers of his column. I cannot handle more letters to the editor, being a sensitive artistic type, and so I am starting to equivocate more. I was quite excited about this street paving excitement until they put an extra layer of tar on top of the crushed rock of the single seal which confused me because it was not really tar, but something that dried quickly and so was not sticky like tar while binding the rock chunks together. I had never seen that done before and thus am unable to go on and on. All I know for certain is that this method of paving is cheaper than laying down concrete or asphalt and it is a lot better than mud puddles, pot holes, and dust.
And then I got all excited again about a local news opportunity when I saw some tall wild grass-looking plants in the ditch alongside Shawnee Road just about half way between the Township Hall and the Fire Person’s and Police Person’s Public Safety building. At first I thought that it was Phragmites australis, which is the tall grass that one sees all along the freeways and tollways going through Gary, Indiana that is terribly invasive completely covering any swamp crowding out all native plants so I did a short drive on I-80 as that is how this plant gets spread all across the U.S. of A., growing in the ditches of the limited access roads and noticed a different color seed plume from our local plant, which means it is probably Arondo donax, a tall grass that has the same leaf pattern as does corn. And thus I do not get to go on and on about invasive plants from other countries. The more I think about it the less certain I am of its identity. When I get the time I will drive down Lauer Road to look at a known stand of Phragmites australis. A report will follow.
There is an interesting and topical story about Nancy Pelosi and Arondo donax which grows very thick along the Rio Grande on this side of the border and gets about twelve feet tall. Back when illegal mass migration was taking place along our southern border, aided by NGOs who were making good money from our government payments for their skills at the facilitation of these caravans and I will spare you the memory of that upsetting time by naming the President then. They had made trails through this grass enough to squeeze through well hidden from above and everywhere else. When this was brought to Pelosi’s attention, her comment was for them to mow the grass, accompanied by arm motions of pushing a lawn mower. I guess the word ‘grass’ has several connotations which is why us professional horticulturists use the Linnean Binomial Nomenclature, and not just to show off to the hoi polloi.
Further amusement was provided by an Associated Press release printed in the July 22 Herald-Palladium entitled “2 more convictions thrown out in 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan governor”. As you will recall, at the time I looked at the mug shots of the people arrested for this offence and stated that none of them looked smart enough to be a threat to anyone for anything. I believe that it was reported that the police had a real police person acting as an undercover agent present at all of the training sessions and meetings of this illustrious group and he was finally instructed to get them organized and on the stick to get along with the kidnapping plans as the police were tired of waiting. If it were me I would have requested a brighter looking group to infiltrate so that I would not have had to do all of the hard organization and implementation work.
It appeared that the defense would have been Entrapment, but that was not the case. The core elements of Entrapment appear to have happened in this case—Government Inducement and Lack of Predisposition. There are two legal tests used by the courts—the Federal and some states use the Subjective Test of focusing on the defendant’s mind—to see if he (they) were predisposed to commit the crime. California and a few other states use the Objective Test which focuses on police conduct, meaning that the police would push a normal, law-abiding person to commit a crime. Anyhow, the newspaper report is that three people had their convictions thrown out on technical grounds. “The appeals court said kidnapping is not an underlying violent felony that can support a conviction under Michigan’s terrorism law.” One of the three people had moved out of state weeks before the FBI made arrests and the other two said that they were no longer in contact with the key figures in this plot at the time the FBI made their move. To finish up this article: “Whitmer, a Democrat, was never physically harmed. Undercover FBI agents and informants were inside Fox’s group for months, and the scheme was broken up.” The news media, at the time, assumed that this was a real authentic plot by real violent revolutionaries and overlooked the fact that the criminal justice system had charged them under the wrong law.
In my ongoing quest to bring accurate, topical, and important information to the readership of this find newspaper, here is my latest attempt—this time it is an explanation of why our local health clinic, the one located just beside the late Apple Valley parking lot and that used to be called “University Medical Clinic” has been referred to by the Corwell hospital computer as the Watervliet Hospital Medical Clinic. When I first saw this the computer did not even know how to spell ‘Watervliet’, and that is because: “Watervliet means flowing water in Dutch, coming from water and vliet which is a Dutch word for a minor streaming water, though it may refer to a city canal or a river that connects such flows.” This saga began back in 1977. Artificial Intelligence says that: “A Federal Rural Health Clinic (RHC) is a certified outpatient facility established by the 1977 Rural Health Clinic Services Act to provide primary care and basic lab services in underserved rural areas, backed by special Medicare and Medicaid cost-based reimbursements.” The requirements are that it must be in a non-urban area designated as a health shortage or underserved area, and has a team approach to staffing using physicians alongside nurse practitioners, physician assistants, or certified nurse-midwives with mid-level providers staffing the clinic and the focus is on primarily outpatient primary care and routine diagnostic lab work and then it qualifies for ‘special federal payment structures to help clinics stay open in remote regions’.
And we can thus conclude that either Corwell is extra sharp with the kinds of office workers who spend their time figuring out how to scam the Medicare and Medicaid systems out of more money or that the original people who set up, started, and funded this facility had a conscience or maybe a sense of ethics. I am hesitant to go any further down this road as I am the beneficiary of the scam, having used this clinic for years and having the people there dedicated to saving my life and prolonging it. As you can see, the only medical facility in this area that qualifies as being ‘rural’ is the one up in Watervliet, and so for billing and legal purposes this local clinic had a name change. I can understand how many of you were confused and probably thought there was some clerical error at Corewell up in St. Joe. Glad I could help with the confusion and hope that you have not lost faith in the government takeover of the health care in our country, at least formerly the Land of the Free. Humor is further provided by the government take over being labelled: “The Affordable Health Care Act” at the time it was enacted. The mainstream news media did not predict how this all was doomed to fail in every aspect that it claimed to improve things.
Because we live in one of the most prolific fruit, berry (brambles), and vegetable producing areas of the world, I like to comment on what it is like to be a farmer. I notice that farmers tend to spend their time battling nature, squabbling with governmental regulations of everything from agricultural chemical controls to migrant labor specific rules and the new regulations about heat exposure. And this summer we have rain and heat and drought to deal with. One of my key employees used to work for the late George Stover and thus knows of what he speaks. Serbando recently told me that when it rains the farmers have to spray every other day. Rain washes the spray dope off the fruit and leaves. The spray costs $1,200 per tankful. I did not get the details on what the spray was for. However, as I recall, peaches get brown rot when it rains, and maybe split pits, and then apples get scab. I have been out of that business for some time and am not up on the details. When it rains strawberries get sun scald and the rain splashes sand onto the strawberries. As I started to say, farmers are too busy working to write about their business and so us scriveners get to say whatever we remember or can make up. The truth is out there someplace.
Besides everything else we can worry about politics and ideology and the apocalypse. For this subject I consulted the August 8-9 WSJ OPINION section and specifically Peggy Noonan’s ever topical op-ed, this time entitled: Socialism Is Here—and It’s Serious. Peggy Noonan is my wife’s favorite writer. She read one of Peggy’s earlier books where she talks about her time being Reagan’s speech writer, and was impressed. I am rushed for time these days and will only be able to string a few sentences together from this op-ed piece. You will get the general thrust of the essay.
The first sentence is: “Socialism is not a passing thing, but an arriving thing. It must be taken seriously …” And in comparison to the early twentieth century Wobblies (IWW people) she says: “Today’s socialists strike me as colder, less human, fiercer and occasionally sociopathic. In general, they appear to have an idea of history rather than attachments to existing people and institutions. Most strike me not as people who love America and wish to make it better, but people ready to exploit its freedoms to build a movement that, if successful would transform America’s fundamental nature. It will no longer be the freedom place …”
“As religion recedes, politics takes its place. The young have been educated within a general framework of assumptions and language of the left—structures of power, oppressor groups, critical theory, intersectionality.” The alert here will remember that I have made a few feeble attempts at explaining intersectionality, and it is difficult to do if one does not understand anything at all about it in the first place. At least I understood that it was important and dangerous.
“It’s our view here that free-market capitalism is organic and flows upward from the human person—man wants to build, trade, invent, provide for and rise, and he erects laws and a way of economic being that allows the realizations of those desires. Economic freedom works with human nature.” “Socialism is a more abstract and ideological vision of justice that doesn’t flow up but must be imposed from the top down. It isn’t based on the natural, or on man as he is; it’s a construct that involves coercion.” “Socialism is a belief, and it summons feeling. Capitalism is a thing of reason, a disadvantage in an age of sensation.”
If you want a longer, and ipso facto more in-depth study I recommend a book I have mentioned before: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century by Francois Furet, all 596 pages. Here from p. 166: “Lenin and Mussolini emerged from the same political family—that of revolutionary socialism.” And so that is what we have to look forward to if this trend continues. Try to not think about it, or you will all be jumping off the bridge instead of using it to come into town. Mussolini invented fascism that influenced the Nazis and we know how that turned out. Lenin set up the basic structure of Russia and we know how that turned out, with millions dying of starvation or while slaving in the Gulag.
As long as we are ending on a down note, I have to confess to being asleep at the switch and missed the opportunity, a month or so ago, of reminding everyone of one of the great local events, a violin concert by Carla Trynchuk, who artificial intelligence states is “an accomplished concert violinist”. She is really good, a natural, who has devoted her life to learning and practicing that art. I am sorry for not keeping up on that scheduled concert.
