Site Ed. Note: The front page delivers the comforting news that the murder spree around Chicago in Worth Township was over, thanks to the alert eyes and rifles of nine farmers and state police. No, it wasn’t the Touhy-Banghart gang on the loose again.

Rather, this time, Old Timer--whose real name was Mercutio--the long-time chicken thief stalking the coops, was dead, dead as the doornail on the coop. His blood was running as Hasty Pudding, splattered all over the walls of the last chicken coop he was ever going to rob.

C. J. Albrecht, local taxidermist, identified Old Timer, a.k.a. Mercutio or Old Comber, not as a Fox, but rather as a prairie or brush wolf, a member of the Coyote family.

Those Coyotes always were ornery, bad sorts, in need of a good whupping.

A Fox on both their houses, the Cesspools and the Caramee Backs, maybe the Droopinghams, too

Out of Pennsylvania came news that the month-old anthracite coal strike was over, most of the remaining miners still on strike, after the President had provided an afternoon deadline of military occupation of the mines should their picketing pickers not comply with his order to return to work, having accepted the directive and returned to the shaft. They did it out of respect for the President, they said, not because they were cowed by any damned threat of the military making them do it.

A remaining contingent, still exclaiming, "Let the troops come," if in less resounding chorus than the day before, called the bluff of the President and awaited military force to be shoved back into the mines.

Their stockings apparently had not been brined acceptably by Santa Claus at Christmas. They had received only bituminous, no salt.

From Guadalcanal came news of relief, at long last, for the Marines who steadfastly had been in continuous fighting on the frontlines in and around Henderson Field since August 7.

The piece suggests the time period of five months to have been 250 days, breaking all records within memory for uninterrupted frontline service, but carries an extra digit into the hundred column. The longest uninterrupted stint of twentieth century battle front duty by Americans of which it remarks, 233 days in France during World War I, still stood.

But no one questioned either the grit or the battle-tested spirit of these Devil Dogs who had, since August 7, chased from Guadalcanal all the enemy, save the last stragglers among the Japanese. The Japanese were now getting out as fast as their legs would carry them to the shore and the transports could get to the shore to pick them up, still not fast enough.

Army personnel, led by Major-General Alexander Patch, were now replacing the remaining Marines, who were bound for duty elsewhere in the theater.

On the editorial page, "Affliction" comments on Samuel Grafton's editorial of the day, suggesting that if Senate Military Affairs Committee Chairman Bob Reynolds could remain in that important position despite his past isolationist agenda and friendship with Herr Hitler, dogmatically in the meantime opposed to Perfidious Albion, then Ed Flynn, despite his political hacksmanship as late Democratic Party Chairman and absent any more diplomatic skills and experience than the diplodocus, could be Minister to Australia.

The editorial protests, says that Bob was there by dint of the unfortunate succumbing to importunate appeals to ignorance among North Carolina's masses devoting themselves to eloquence during the Depression, appeals to the lesser lights while he paraded around the state in his Tin Lizzie, claiming his initial opponent, incumbent Cam Morrison, was but a man bathing daily in caviar, as now Buncombe Bob had matched his wits with the daughter of the Hope Diamond's proud owner, once heir to The Washington Post.

The mistake, it contends, would be rectified by the voters, but could not until 1944--as, indeed, it would be. The Ed Flynn appointment, by contrast, it further argues, was subject to confirmation by the Senate immediately and could be disapproved.

So, Mr. Davis concludes that, while the bucketfuls of rain tossing California's always unstable hillsides along its coastal roads could not be abated, the flood plain of the Mississippi Valley could nevertheless be dammed and rearranged to enable control against erosion, leading to floods, crop damage, farming loss, displacement of migrants and sharecroppers, leading potentially to another depression somewhere downriver.

And, not only Senator Reynolds, according to Mr. Grafton, but Senator Wheeler was off as well, wheeling through the tulgey wood by the tum-tum trees, suggesting Brazilian fruit was necessary for war and so was improvident for the fruit's product to be sent to them in return for the fruit, as the war was not down there, but over there, where Senator Wheeler had long advocated never going in the first instance, that is to the tulgey wood.

Mr. Grafton concludes that Senator Wheeler was out to put a "twist in the President's necktie" by being impertinent to the Good Neighbor Policy and the mutual trade agreement recently established with South America whereby manufactured tires would be exchanged for the raw material while more of the raw material's product would go to lug the Quartermaster's quotas to wheel the Army vehicles, all in replacement of the raw material lost in 1942 in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, as he likewise undermined at once the war effort while sounding in support of it--an old game being played with new mirrors.

Whether Wheeler ever played the game in Mexico in 1941, we don't know.

Likewise was Senator Reynolds, said Mr. Grafton, off on another bully expedition to the jungles, seeking to know whether there was, as had been reported, coddling of the Japanese internees in the detention camps in the South.

--Here, on Devil's Island, there is no escape. You need not think of escape. You are here, and here you shall remain, and for the rest of your natural days.

Whether Reynolds played the game in Mexico in 1941, we don't know.

Mr. Grafton, however, also reserves a knock at the President's door for having nominated Flynn in the first place when better qualified men such as Wendell Willkie or Herbert Agar of the Louisville Courier-Journal would have made a sounder choice for the post at General MacArthur's side in Australia. That appointment, he finds, together with the Darlan debacle of November and December, winding up with Darlan dead, would not serve to derail isolationists' tulgey wood tumbling through the glass darkly. The best way, he offers, to conquer obscurantism is to conquer it, and not coddle it.

Raymond Clapper, in one of two pieces on the page, remembering his March, 1942 ride over Africa sitting on Army crates in a transport plane which took him to India and China, tracing in days what once had taken years for Marco Polo to accomplish, suggests that Hitler's reliance on panzer divisions and their coverage by the Luftwaffe to foist on Europe and England the concept of the lightning war would become something soon--especially given America's new air power, both in fight and transport of materiel and men, increased arithmetically since he had written his far flung editorials the previous year--Hitler would live to regret.

Herr Hitler would also die in regret of it.

Ironically, in 1944, while covering the air war in the Pacific, Mr. Clapper would lose his life aboard a downed U.S. bombing plane.

In his other editorial of the day, he inveighs against the stodgy 50-year old practices being maintained in the House. He welcomes the rebellious fresh air offered by Representative Albert Gore of Tennessee, who had told Collier's that rule changes needed to be implemented and reorganization accomplished with the same authority given the President for the executive branch in the two reorganization bills previously passed by the Congress.

Mr. Gore's son, as Vice-President, would champion the cause during the Clinton Administration, and with considerable success, cutting executive branch bureaucracy, thereby helping to enable the smallest Federal government since 1962.

Yet, the Republicans in the year 2000, always in favor of bigger and better government, roundly labeled Mr. Gore a Big Government Liberal Spender and thus got their brilliant constituency onboard the cattle ship once again.

Head 'em up, move 'em out.

But, that was a long time ago, now--ten whole years. Tempus fugit.

"Soothsayer" applauds Joseph Davies, former Ambassador to Russia, for his accurate prediction a year earlier, that Russia would survive 1942 with morale fully intact.

It therefore now, crowning him with the gift of prophecy as a result, looks to his more recent prediction offered Arthur Krock of The New York Times, that Hitler would build a Siegfried Line across the Mediterranean and fight rearguard actions in North Africa and the Ukraine, all to buy time to enable a final thrust toward the oilfields of Baku on the Caspian during the summer offensive of 1943, while he tried to "wall himself in", erecting a Chuck McCarthy government to obtain favorable terms of peace, "eliminating himself".

Well, in most respects, even if the summarized remarks following those quoted hit closer to the bull's eye, though it would take until May, 1945 to realize in part, until August, 1961 to realize yet further, the prophecy was, once again, fulfilled, even if perhaps not in the way Herr Hitler and his mates of the Reich who survived him might have wished it to be.

"Eeeny, Meeny" finds cruelty in the contradictory remarks issuing from Manpower administrator Paul McNutt, first stating that there was no need yet to play alarmist and set a definite deadline for when fathers might first become susceptible to the draft, then, in another quote having apparently indicated summer as the time when fathers could so anticipate.

It was a non-anticipatory anticipation, an affirmative statement pregnant with negative implications, just another nutty example of Washington bureaucratic witty work manifesting its strident wisdom astride the world.

So, what else is new, Mr. Davis?

"Stop & Look" suggests that the anti-loanshark bill before the State Legislature, which sought to impose limits on interest rates chargeable on small loans to prevent usury, might actually be a Trojan Horse, bearing instead the gift of higher interest rates, merely legalized, as high as 42%, as proposed.

Well, 42% is better than 150%, we suppose. But what's the difference if the loanshark and his loanshark-defending chuckbooted "lawyers" take everything yo's got and ruins yo' name in the process? It might as well be 10,000%.

You cannot get blood from a stone, Loan Shark and Chuck Booty. Yo?

Yo mama did what?

To who?

In Chapter 16 of They Were Expendable, the PT-boats reach Cagayan in Mindanao, the final destination of General MacArthur, his family, Admiral Rockwell, and the generals on the sea cruise.

Kelly makes landfall accurately before dawn, if a little unsteady in the final approach, receiving final praise for his navigational skills from Admiral Rockwell.

General MacArthur promises to decorate the entire crew with the Silver Star and to try to arrange air transport out of the southern islands for them.

Kelly held out little hope, however, of fulfillment of the latter promise after discovering that only one of four Flying Fortresses, supposed to pick up the brass, had made it from Australia.

At the end of the day, Kelly routinely checked PT-34's anchor off the beach at Cagayan, only to find the line had sheered off its anchor threads. As the tide moved out, the boat was swept to shore and beached, stuck among the coral reefs.

Bulkeley cautioned Kelly that if they were not able to free the vessel, they would have to blow it up at the first sight of the enemy.

Determined to save his faithful boat which had sunk two ships and two landing craft while in service off Corregidor, Kelly organized the feverish work, by hand and with explosives, to try to unlock his mosquito from the coral. During the next several days, the crew sought unsuccessfully to free the boat, finally resorting to the hire of natives with the money they had won from playing poker with the Army, a good substitute, he sardonizes, for absent pay since December 7.

--American soldier-man, he give us freejack to clear fish-boot off jaggy-rock. American soldier-man, he crazy. Boot very big for glassy water. We free boot though.

Whatever the fate of the boats and crew, they had performed their diligent service of enabling General MacArthur’s escape from the enemy, desirous of diminishing American morale with his capture. The General was now only a still perilous air journey away from assuming his new command post in Australia.

He had said before leaving Corregidor, "I shall return." He would keep that primary promise.

A photograph appears with this chapter, identifying Army nurse "Peggy", Kelly's love interest on Corregidor and Bataan, as actually being Lieutenant Beulah Greenwalt, believed captured by the Japanese at the fall of Corregidor in May, the hospital personnel on Bataan having been evacuated to the Rock just before the peninsula's surrender in April.

Lieutenant Greenwalt, when captured, wore the regimental flag to protect it from capture, telling her credulous, chivalrous captors that it was her shawl. She maintained the flag throughout her 33 months imprisonment in Manila, from which she was freed in February, 1945 when Manila was invaded by the Allies. She was back in her hometown in Missouri, visiting with her mother for the first time in three and a half years, by the time Manila fell March 3. She passed away at age 81 in February, 1993 in Palo Alto, California.

And, as to the "Side Glances" of the day, it would seem that the cartoonist had perhaps read Mr. Grafton's previous day's piece and, just in spite of the dotard's putter, decided to splotch a dot in a particularly interesting place in the portrait--that is, should you give it a glance askance to the side.

Is that a picture of Popeye hanging on the wall, or one favoring General MacArthur?

Anyway, by the way, apparently, the way things are going, the Phants don't wanta Dance this year under the moonlight. Or, are we just seeing things, the steely-eyed Demonic Power manifested in the Silver Lining, yet to be revealed, as at the end of January, 1997, for instance?