Ed Lester Quotes

Vonnegut opened the piece with an observation about Jack the Ripper from an old story in the London Times in 1888 in which the reporter complimented the unknown killer for his dissection skills. “Now, Cape Cod has a mutilator,” Vonnegut wrote. “Whoever did it was no artist with a knife. He chopped up the women with what the police guess was probably a brush hook or an axe.” Vonnegut laid out the “horrible and pitiful and sickening” details as he had learned them from Ed Dinis and Lester Allen. He then described Tony Costa as a gentle

That's the snapshot Andy Clutter-buck took of John and Sally Ratcliffe at the Frye-burgh State Fair, just about a year ago. John's got his arm around her in that picture, and she's holdin the stuffed bear he won her in the shootin gallery, and they both look so happy they could just about split. But that was then and this is now, as they say; these days Sally is engaged to Lester Pratt, the high school Phys Ed coach. He's a true-blue Baptist, just like herself. John hasn't got over the shock of losin her yet. See him fetch that sign? He's worked himself into a pretty good case of the blues. Only a man who's still in love (or thinks he is) can fetch a sigh that deep.

Mormon Thought, the first appearing in 1969 and the second in 1973. In his 1969 essay “A Commentary on Steven G. Taggart’s Mormonism’s Negro Policy: Social and Historical Origins,” Bush excoriated Taggart for his limited, incomplete research.7 Bush systematically dismantled Taggart’s central thesis that Joseph Smith initiated black priesthood denial in response to Latter-day Saint difficulties in Missouri. Bush supported his refutation with extensive documentation.8 Bush further developed his arguments in a second in-depth Dialogue article entitled “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview” published in 1973. His fifty-seven page essay containing some 219 footnotes constituted by far the most comprehensive examination of Mormon racial policy up to that time.9 Bush’s essay drew heavily from a four-hundred-page compendium of primary and secondary documents compiled over some ten years. Covering the period from the 1830s to the 1970s, Bush’s “Compilation on the Negro in Mormonism” contains First Presidency minutes, Quorum of the Twelve meeting minutes, and other General Authority interviews and writings.10 Bush’s carefully written text found minimal evidence to support the LDS Church’s official position that the priesthood ban resulted from divine revelation—thus contradicting a major justification for its existence. Seeking to undermine its legitimacy and thus prod the Church toward change, Bush summarily dismissed the ban as the unfortunate product of socio-historical forces present in the larger nineteenth century American society. The scholarly studies of Stephen Taggart and especially Lester E. Bush Jr. greatly influenced my own work, which commenced as