The temperature at midnight was 51.9°F. It was 44.0°F at 0745. Currently, 1200, it is 47.8°F. It has been damp, breezy, and overcast all morning. The bright sunny crisp weather of October is, hopefully, not that far behind.
Friday morning there were male turkeys gobbling in the woods across the creek, in the eastern edge of our back yard. This is the archery-hunting season for turkey.
I need to mow the lawn in the next day or two. In the area formerly shaded by the Bradford pear there are numerous suckers springing up. I’ve cut them all summer with no real success. The firing lane needs to be weed-whipped with the string trimmer.
I managed to sleep in this morning until 0745. That’s about an hour longer than usual and it makes quite a difference in how I feel. The heat pump is turned to heat so that the house will warm up a bit.
As with yesterday’s post, the matter of veterans on campus pushes forward. We’ll follow one bit of that trail today.
The GI Bill of Rights that was put in place for WWII veterans was multi-purpose in nature. The primary thrust was to keep unemployed returning veterans from flooding a job market already ramping down with the war’s end. The WWII vets got a tuition and books payment that allowed them to enroll and a monthly stipend that helped with their educational and living expenses. The VietNam returnees got a slightly different package. The education component for VietNam vets was just a monthly payment that didn’t start to arrive until a month after classes began.
The problem was, for many of us, that we had to come up with the enrollment and textbook money before we could enroll and survive that first month. We tried repeatedly to get the University to allow us a month’s deferment on our enrollment and other fees. It was like asking for time to reverse. The best solution the University would offer was to apply for a short-term loan that might or might not be approved in time to enroll. And if enrollment was not completed by the government’s deadline, there would be no stipend for the next semester.
The stipend also was geared around an academic enrollment that would result in a four-year degree. So most of us were carrying 15 hours of classes and some sort of job. There were semesters I carried 18 hours plus a 40 hour OR job in order to take two honors college courses I managed to talk my way into.
There was no organized presence of veteran on the campus. We were not invisible, I knew about 10-15 all told, we just attended classes, worked at our jobs, and sometimes spent the hours between classes drinking coffee and smoking with another vet or two who might share a class.
No veteran I knew was interested in the campus activities, dances, etc. We might attend a concert but otherwise we managed to stay largely unnoticed.
We all wore bits and pieces of military uniforms because we had them; they were serviceable, durable, and warm in the winter. We were mostly used to humping a ruck(sack) so we found surplus packs to carry our books, notebooks, pens, pencils, and slide rules.
It was a pro-war campus in a pro-war county, in a pro-war state. Some of us wore Vets for Peace or VVAW buttons. Even those caused little comment. We might have expected to at least be acknowledged as vets. But we seemed to move through the campus perimeters like ghosts.
I managed to get the mowing done this afternoon. There’s trimming left to do, knock down the higher, tougher stuff that defeats the mowers. It will be there Monday.
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