This program was the kind in which I could not tell Pat where I was going or what I was doing, so we weren’t real happy with the situation as it affected our life together. Things got easier once I moved up the chain of command; the hours and days got no shorter but at least we could talk about what I was working on.
Roy Beckemeyer, 1430, 25 November, 2025.
Tuesday November 25, 2025. I am 84 years old today. I was born on Tuesday, Nov. 25, 1941. There seems to be a certain symmetry about that. Born 9 years before the middle of the 20th Century, living now, 25 years before the middle of the 21st Century.
The weather for the day of my birth (in St. Louis, Missouri, the nearest city to Breese, Illinois) was high of 54, low of 27. There had been 2.3 inches of snow on the 22nd, 3.0 inches on the 23rd. So I expect my parents had made the trip to the hospital in Breese through snow, which would have melted some during the day. It had been 15 degrees the night of the 24th. The weather forecast for today in Wichita, Kansas, is a high of 57 degrees, low tonight of 29 degrees (there’s that symmetry again). No snow, here at all yet this year, though.
The headline for the day of my birth in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (the morning paper for St. Louis; the evening paper was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch): “U.S. May Seize French Guiana and Martinique; Troops Go to New Base: Roosevelt Orders Dutch Colony Guard.” Dutch Guiana (Now Surinam) was just east of Venezuela, and French Guiana was east of Dutch Guiana. The Netherlands had been overrun by Nazi Germany, and U.S. troops had been sent to Dutch Guiana with the cooperation of the Netherlands government in exile on November 23rd, primarily because that country supplied 60% of the bauxite used by the United States in the manufacture of aluminum, which was needed for the production of airplanes.
Of course, today we have a U. S. Navy fleet just off the coast of Venezuela with the Trump Administration considering a troop incursion onto Venezuelan soil. No Nazis today, just drug runners. Another example of a “sort-of” symmetry, I suppose. (We were still 12 days short of entering the War on my birth date; the U. S. unsuspecting of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that loomed on the horizon.)
The Supreme Court on Nov. 24, 1941 had “laid down the doctrine today that relief to the needy and interstate migration are matters of national concern and struck down an effort by California to deal independently with the problem.” “The court held unconstitutional a so-called ‘anti-Okie law, which made it a misdemeanor to help an indigent of another state to enter California…”
So that is an interesting sort of topsy-turvy inversion of symmetry between 1941 and 2025.
Where is all this going? I don’t know, just pondering what it feels like to have spent 84 years on this old earth, I suppose.
More later.
Roy Beckemeyer, 0740, Nov. 25, 2025.
phanaerozoic 