Pontiac Famous Quotes

KATHRYN CRAVENS, the first female radio commentator, whose series News Through a Woman’s Eyes ran on CBS for Pontiac from Oct. 19, 1936, until April 8, 1938. Cravens began her career at KMOX, the CBS affiliate in St. Louis. She had been an actress, and now, on radio, she told stories, sang, and did Negro dialect by memory of her mammy in Texas. She had no news background and paid little attention to the tenets of reporting. As she told Radio Guide, the “five w’s” were less important in her stories than the big question, “how does it feel?” … “how does it feel to be the mother of a murdered boy, of one to be executed that night? … how does it feel to survive flood and misery? … to be America’s most notorious shoplifter? … to be mayor of a great city, a congressional lobbyist, a famous playwright, a war-torn cripple, a flophouse bum?” This was her scope.

The royalists or Cavaliers, wore their hair long. They sported dashing beards and mustaches. Their costumes were lavish and romantic. Large codpieces were the fashion equivalent of the tight pants and bulge brigades of 1970s rock. The royalists were unrepentant drunks and fornicators, but they were also students of philosophy, inspired by all cultures of history, not only Christian. Their experiments in alchemy and astrology evolved into modern chemistry and astronomy. Their opposition, the Puritans, were a younger generation rebelling in every way against their fathers, whom they considered irresponsible, reprehensible, and downright pagan. The Puritans were sober. They forbade dancing. Laughter was not allowed. And they couldn’t run or walk too fast, only proceed at a measured pace. In May 1627 Tom decided to celebrate May Day with the locals. There would be food, drink, a maypole, music, dancing, and hopefully wenching; everyone was invited including Indigenous men and women, a guest list that scandalized the Pilgrims. Imagine a round green hill that overlooked the Atlantic Ocean. Red gooseberry flowers and white dogwood blossoms decorated the forest bright under the May sun. Indigenous people and Europeans alike helped prepare and raise the maypole. Stripped of bark, the eighty-foottall yellow pine practically glowed, decorated with multicolored ribbons flowing in the breeze. A noble set of antlers crowned the top. They served beer they had brewed from their own hops, and they marched with guns and drums in a parade that faintly echoed the cavalry procession at Queen Elizabeth’s Christmas gala that Tom had seen as a child so long ago. Tom and his men composed The Poem. Not quite a manifesto, he read it aloud then nailed it to the maypole. Tom must have had to explain the ancient Greek myths he referenced. The widow he loved and left back home in England must still have been on his mind, as were Indigenous widows, who were often seen weeping over the graves of their lost loved ones. When Tom begins The Poem by calling on Oedipus, he’s asking the famous solver of the riddle of the Sphinx to solve Tom’s riddle. But Tom also knew that Oedipus had cured the plague that was destroying ancient Thebes, so The Poem was asking for a healing of the plague-devastated New World.