Moeller Commentary: How Many Bits and Pieces Can Fill Up a Column? Read On

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To begin, I hereby confess to an error in last week’s column. I stated that Perry, Oklahoma, was the birthplace of Will Rogers. Wrong. He was born in Oklahoma, all right, but in Dog Island Ranch in Indian Territory near a place called Oologa. It was Buster Keaton who came from Perry. I should know by now not to trust my memory too far. 

I’d like to comment on the Lewis County resident who shot that beloved elk in Eastern Washington, but this is a family newspaper. My description would have included a well-known word for the end of the alimentary canal.

I have to tell you about a weird coincidence that happened to me recently. A couple of years ago I picked up a book at a used book sale that was written by a Korean War veteran paratrooper named Delton Collins. I started reading, but put it away because I didn’t much care for the style in which it was written.

I wish I had read further, because I picked it off the shelf again on a whim last week and discovered that the two of us had been in the same company: Easy Company, Second Battalion, 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team. 

His book doesn’t list any dates of his activities, but it gives me the impression from the ones he describes that he arrived shortly after I had already been pulled out and hospitalized with frostbite.

The 187th made two combat parachute jumps during that war; I was there for the first one and he was in the second, which was much more dangerous. I’m attempting to get in touch with him through his publisher. The book was printed 12 years ago.

Changing topics, deadlines prevented me last week from commenting on the honor I received in the Centralia College Library for my donation of all the books I had collected by and about Mark Twain in the nearly 35 years I did my impression of that American genius. 

I don’t think anyone else noticed, but to me it was another example of selective memory loss. A few little bits and pieces seemed to wind up either altered or absent in the presentation of one of my favorite Twain pieces. Anyway, I certainly appreciated the evening and thank the library — and the college, of course — for the recognition. 



Here’s another reason for reading something — anything — from a book instead of one of those electronic gadgets. You can look at a book resting on a table next to your favorite chair and tell at a glance from where the bookmark is placed how far you still have to go before the end is reached.

It’s taken more than eight years, but, as time goes by, I seem to get more comments about these printed efforts from people I meet. Favorable ones, too. 

It’s as if I’ve received the mantle of the beloved Gordon Aadland as a spokesman to what he used to call “ladies in sensible shoes” and their male counterparts. I’d like to feel modest about it, but I can’t. I’ll just say, “Thank you.”

I love those Pemco Insurance TV ads that say, “We’re just like you — a little different” and don’t mind seeing any of them repeated, but wouldn’t it be refreshing if a few future ones also showed some African Americans, Hispanic Americans or Native Americans doing the same silly or dumb things that the Caucasians are filmed doing? 

Or would that be condemned for being ethnically abusive?

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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.