Through An 'Old Timer's' Eyes
By Howard 'Mac' McDonald

When I hear of all the problems they're having as they try to make Iraq into a democracy, my mind wanders back to P. O. D. class at good old Elizabeth High. You had to have a passing grade in Probems of Democracy to graduate.

The teacher was a middleaged, no-nonsense spinster with her hair pulled back. She often tested us out in the morning with a "little quiz" that ended up being about 100 questions.

I don't remember much of what she tried to teach us, but it looks like Iraq is reading from the same book. There are plenty of problems of that democracy right now.

We also studied citizenship. Those lessons seem to be lost now. Citizenship used to be a privilege to be earned. Now, the 12 million illegal aliens in this country will have it handed to them. What a slap in the face to those who came through Ellis Island and worked so hard to become Americans.

I was stationed in France when son David was born. By the time he was five, we were in Missouri and I took him to Kansas City, to get his citizenship.

The federal judge said, "David, why do you want to be a U.S. citizen?"

"Because my dad is!" was his reply.

"That's good enough for me," the judge declared, and that was that.

If we wouldn't have done that, and David would have visited France, they could have demanded that he join the French army. He also needed that citizenship to play American Legion baseball in Emporium.

One time, coach Tom Hayden took David and teammates Matt Tompkins, Rod LaBorde and Kevin Genevro to Canisius College to watch Bill Leonard in a basketball game. They had some time to kill, so they went over the Peace Bridge into Canada. On the way back, the border guard asked whether everyone was born in the U.S.

"Everyone but David -- he was born in France," Rod blurted out.

Fortunately, Tom carried all of the legion baseball paperwork with him, so he was able to avoid a long delay at the border.

With the holidays behind us, many of us are fighting the Battle of the Bulge. My problem is that I like to eat just about anything. Being a child of the Great Depression probably made me this way.

Restaurant buffets are where people really pack on the pounds. Most people try to cram all kinds of food on those little plates. Not me. In my training as a professional eater, I have learned not to overfill a plate. When I finish one, I go right back for a clean one. My downfall is that I try to deplete the whole stack of clean plates. My wife says I have it in for the poor dish washers.

Not too many people want to be dish washers but, to me, that is an honorable profession. It also gets the dirt out from under your fingernails.

In the military, everyone knows about "KP." It stands for Kitchen Patrol, or to some people, Kitchen Police. When the first sergeant told me I had KP, I was pleased. I thought to myself, "When that mean old drill instructor comes through the line, I'm gonna arrest him!"

KP was actually 18 hours of pure misery. After that torture, falling asleep was not a problem.

So now come all of the holidays for famous Americans. Several places will be closed this coming Monday for the latest addition, honoring the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In Atlanta, I've noticed that there are only about six streets that are not named for Dr. King. That makes it hard to look up an address.

February has two notable birthdays, Feb. 22 for George Washington and Feb. 12 for Abraham Lincoln.

For all that he accomplished, President Washington, born in 1732, seems to be most famous for the boyhood fable, where he supposedly told his father, "I cannot tell a lie; I cut down that cherry tree." Even as a boy, he was a true politician.

President Lincoln, born in 1809, was an amazing man whose life was cut short by an assassin in 1865.

It used to be that both of those birthdays were national holidays. We used to joke as kids that we were getting off school for "George Birthington's washday." However, the bean counters really like their threeday weekends, so they combined the two for "Presidents Day," whatever that is supposed to mean.