Technical difficulties!

Sheesh...

So last night when I went to publish yesterday’s post, Substack didn’t seem to like anything about the word doc I always use to cut and paste onto the Substack site. First it was too long -I guess because of the photos - and I got a message that the post would be truncated, but not to worry - it’s a gmail thing and readers could go somewhere else and read the full post. That didn’t sound good, so I experimented with making the photos smaller. I couldn’t tell if that worked, so I resorted to crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.

Then it made some pictures simply disappear. I fooled around with that for a while and found that if I stacked them vertically, they appeared, but that looked kinda stupid, plus I couldn't label them, so I gave up on pictures of York, Mathew Henson, and the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts.

By this time I was pretty suspicious as to how this was all going to turn out, so I took advantage of a Substack feature that I’d never used before and sent myself a ‘test post’ to see how it would look. It looked fine, except it was in Arabic. Literally. At that point I should have just gone to bed, but I poured myself a dirty, dry martini, thought of Calvin Coolidge and persisted.

Finally, everything was perfect, except for the non-inclusion of York, Henson, and the Scouts. I was confident because I’d proof read and copy edited it around a hundred times. So I pressed ‘Publish’, which always makes me kinda nervous.

A few seconds later it showed up in my email. I always read it again to see how it looks in the actual email and to find the one typo that I never find before pressing ‘publish’. For a little why I couldn’t figure out what was going on. “Wait…didn’t I already read that? Didn’t I already see that photo up above? NOW what am I doing wrong?” Finally I figured out that Substack screwed up. Either that or they liked it so much they published it twice. A friend whom I’ll call Jim (maybe now former friend, because I can’t say I appreciated his sarcasm) said that he felt lucky to have had the opportunity to read it twice. I honestly have no idea if it was me or Substack. I’m going with Substack…and my apologies.

When Henson and Peary returned from the North Pole, Henson got almost as many accolades as the admiral, which pissed off the admiral. So after decades of serious exploring around the world, he parted ways with his trusted sidekick. When Peary died in 1920 he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. When Henson died in 1955 he was buried in Woodlawn in NY. Peary had made it known that Henson should not be honored with an Arlington burial. But after a bit of a long hub-bub and the support and advocacy of Harvard Professor Allen Counter, President Ronald Reagan granted Henson internment rights at Arlington in 1987. But here’s the funny part: Quite a few years ago I visited Arlington. As it turned out, Henson was buried just a few dozen feet from Peary, with an equally ornate memorial and UPHIL from the admiral where Henson could look down on him. I had to chuckle.

Thousands of Black troops are buried in Arlington. There’s an entire, huge, USCT - U.S. Colored Troops - section. Arlington was established in 1864, but it took an executive order from Harry Truman in 1948 before Black and White fallen warriors were buried side-by-side and Arlington became fully integrated.

Back to Calvin Coolidge - “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "Press on "has always solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”