Saturday

 

It looks like a fire but it isn't, it's someone's light. Looking east from the sidewalk. Venus is behind the cloud, high. Out here on 7H porch, looking up, half a waning moon trailed by Mars. As the east continues pink and pinker with the rising sun.

Several boats are moving on the Bay, and one ship at the moment, Campeche Bay 279x41

underway for Progreso, with container cargo.

HISTORY: This Day in History reports that on Aug 8, 1974 President Richard Nixon resigned under pressure from Congress and the public. I remember it well. I'd voted for Nixon as President three times, and thought he was a good president until the Watergate affair came up. But early in my Navy years, a chief petty officer, Cook who worked with me at the U S Naval Station, Mayport, Florida from 1959 to 1962, had served as White House staff with President Eisenhower. Chief Cook could not stand Vice President Nixon whom, he said, in contrast to General Eisenhower's kindness, Nixon was a jerk, haughty, arrogant, and rude. It seems a shame for a man who had himself been born into a poor family to so forget his origins and elevate himself in his own eyes. 

Nixon resigned in singular disgrace, was succeeded by Gerald Ford, who next election was defeated by Jimmy Carter, whom I once met on a commercial air flight from WashingtonDC to Atlanta. After the plane settled into flight, President Carter came down the aisle greeting everyone and stopping to chat. I asked him how his mother was ("Miss Lillian" was nationally and popularly known as a character), and he paused to say Why thank you for asking, and to tell me that She was fine. A Naval Academy graduate and nuclear submarine qualified as a naval officer, Jimmy Carter was and is a good man, a Southern gentleman and a powerfully if gently spoken Christian. Sometimes the difference in men in power is whether they are good or evil. 

Relax: tomorrow's Sunday.

T+