(1) Abe Fortas was a Supreme Court justice. He was even nominated to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by Lyndon Johnson. His nomination did not succeed (many thought it was because Fortas was Jewish – this certainly seemed to have played a role), but it also turned out that Fortas had some other problems – he was being paid to give lectures at American University by a bunch of his former clients, and he had entered into some sort of arrangement with a financier named Louis Wolfson, who was to have paid Fortas $20,000 a year (only the first payment was made and it had been returned). Wolfson was accused, and I think convicted, of insider trading. He appealed to the Supreme Court. Fortas recused himself, and the Court did not take the case. But Fortas was convinced to resign from the Court.

Is this very different from Clarence Thomas? He has been sent on luxury vacations by Harlan Crow, also a business man (development rather than finance), and has for years been paid by Conservative groups to give speeches. Equal is equal, no? Should Thomas follow in Fortas’ footsteps?

(2) Sometimes, I have to question even my own memory. I have for a year or so put Charles King’s book “Odessa” on my “one day I will read” list. The day before yesterday, I finally started it – I had picked it up at the Montgomery County Wheaton used book store a few weeks before. I am about half way through it – in the middle of the 19th century. But I have to ask some questions: Why does this book seem so familiar? Have I read it before?

The book was published in 2011, which means it would have been a post-retirement read. I know we don’t have another copy in the house. Where would I have read it? Will I ever know the answers to these questions? Does it make a difference? Probably not. But it is one more mystery.

(3) The Nationals and the Rockies split their 4 game series. Let’s talk about Denver. I haven’t spent much time there and haven’t been there for, I am sure, more than 20 years. Here are my recollections:

a. When I left basic/advanced training at Ft. Ord, California in 1968, I decided to take a Greyhound bus back to St. Louis, as I had never seen most of the west before. I remember going through Sacramento, Reno, Winnemucca, Salt Lake City, the Rockies, and Denver. Deciding not to sit on a bus across Kansas, I flew from Denver to St. Louis, and I made that decision before we arrived at Denver. I had already been on the bus a few days, because I stopped in some of the places named above to have a look around.

When the bus pulled into the station in Denver, I needed to get lunch and then go to the airport (that’s my memory). Across from the bus stop, there was a restaurant with a sign that said “Topless Waitresses”. I went in and, lo and behold, this was a restaurant with topless waitresses. A topless waitress seated me, took my order and brought me my food. I keep trying to remember, but for the life of me, I have no idea how the food was.

b. When I was working at HUD, I took a business trip to Denver. It was a short trip – flying west in the morning, and east late at night. I went with a woman that I was working with. I have no idea what the purpose of the trip was, but I remember after meeting with people in the morning, one of the men with whom we met said “I made reservations at the Denver Club for lunch”. He then turned to my companion and said “….but I don’t think they will let you in. They don’t allow women in the dining room, but I think you can get something to eat in the bar.” Say, what? I never saw the Denver Club.

c. We once drove from Santa Fe to Denver on a vacation. Would you believe that this is a beautiful drive? It was disappointing to reach the end, but Denver didn’t fail us. While we weren’t looking for entertainment, we found it. The most extraordinary lightening experience we had ever seen anywhere (or have seen since). Lightening like fireworks exploding across the sky.

d. Each of these trips involved flying into or out of (or both) Stapleton Airport, now closed. When I was working at HUD, one of my suite mates was a fellow, about my age, named Craig Stapleton. Nice fellow – also a “Special Assistant”, but he was a political appointee (this was the Nixon administration) and I was not. I remember when I got back from the Denver business trip I mentioned above, I asked him if he knew that the airport in Denver was named Stapleton. He looked at me without expression and said: “Yeah, it was named after my grandfather”.

That’s when I learned that Craig’s grandfather had been mayor of Denver. Craig was not from Denver, by the way. I was surprised and, I must say, a bit impressed. I haven’t seen Craig since he and I left HUD (that’s over 50 years ago), but he seems to have done OK for himself – he became the U.S. Ambassador both to the Czech Republic (or maybe it was Czechoslovakia at the time) and to France. Nice guy. I wish him the best.

That reminds me of another fellow who was one of the four Special Assistants – he was of Hispanic descent (I will not identify him here, but will use his initials MS), and I assumed it was his Hispanic background that helped get him the job (it was an era of incipient diversity) and I assumed he came from an immigrant background and was making his way in the new world. I never questioned my opinion. After all, he came from Brownsville TX. Even today, Wikipedia describes Brownsville at 94% Hispanic.

Once after a holiday weekend, I asked MS if he had gone home. He told me he had gone to visit his grandparents. “In Brownsville?”, I asked. “No”, he said, and he named some town in the Hudson River Valley. I was very surprised, asking him how long ago his family had moved North. His answer was something like: “Oh, it was sometime in the late 17th century. They were Dutch. Their name was van __________.”

Whoa, I thought. Who is this guy? And what about his New York Dutch society mother who married a poor Mexican immigrant and moved to Brownsville? I asked a few more questions. “Your father’s family is Mexican, though?” “Oh, no, my father is from Barcelona.”

Now, I was really taken aback. How does a Spaniard (Catalan?) from Barcelona marry a Dutch lady from the Hudson Valley and wind up, of all places, in Brownsville. What misfortune led them to such a place?

“How did they wind up in Brownsville?”, I asked. “Oh, my dad’s business is there”, he responded. “What does he do?”, I asked. “He owns ________ (I forget the number) oil tankers.”

MS did not wind up as Ambassador to France, but he wound up as the Anheuser Busch distributor in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country.

e. One more. I did fly into Denver in 2019 – just before the pandemic struck. But not to go to Denver – just to pick up a car and drive north to Ft. Collins. All I remember is that I liked the ceiling of the new airport – the first time I had been to Denver since Stapleton closed. Does that count for anything?

And there you have it.