DRU Tamale Recipe
rolled with chopped beef and pork
served on chili sauce, radishes, lemon juice
masa, beef, juice ground corn like pancake
onions
cook in a corn husk, meal spread over the husk
ends folded over and immersed in steam
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Don, Bill and John
The Don R | Elliott | Joe Rangus site is being moved from Blogger to a more standard platform. Stay tuned while it is migrated. If you are willing to help, send a message to me on Twitter @knowlengr or @darkviolin.com. Help is needed for genealogy updates, too.
That’s me trying to scale the wall.
Sketch for World Trade Center Replacement (2002)
It was with an engineer’s “Let’s fix this” kind of thinking that Dad responded to the destruction of the World Trade Center towers with a sketch of his own. Though he would be completely unsurprised to learn that the replacement ultimately did not open until June of 2014, and represented an arduous set of compromises and negotiations, he took seriously the notion that every citizen could participate somehow in forging a suitable design. Though he had little experience with the scale of compromise that was required, or the political wrangling and anguished hand-wringing that ensued, he perhaps unconsciously sent the message that he, or his children, could made a difference even in places far removed from one’s self-important humdrum and bother.That is, with sufficient persistence and effort.
He succeeded in passing on a work ethic that likely exceeded his own expectations for his children and to this day bedevils the friends and spouses of each of the six of us.
You can read his letter and see his rough sketch.
Ellen Rentzmann’s Service Letter from WW I
Bureau of Medicine & Surgery
Navy Department
Washington DC
October 17, 1917
To: Ellen C. Rentzmann
18 Taylor
Oak Park Ill.
Subject: Enrollment in the Naval Coast Defense Reserve, (Class 4.), U.S.N.R.F
1. You are hereby enrolled in the provisional grade of nurse, in the Naval Coast Defense Reserve (Class 4), U.S.N.R.F., in accordance with the Act of Congress making appropriations for the Naval Service for the fiscal year ending June 3, 1917, and for other purposes, approved August 29, 1916, to serve for a period of four years from September 18, 1917.
(Signed) W.C.Braisted.
By Direction.
Oath executed.
Before. (Signed) A.C. Nordil
Date. 9-24-17
Commission Expires May 4, 1919.
ALWAYS KEEP THIS PAPER
Certified to be a true copy.
signed by Ellen C. Rentzmann
Historical Notes
1. W.C. Braisted referred to Navy Surgeon General William C. Braisted (who had been born the year before Lincoln was assassinated). While the War effort was uppermost, an even greater challenge lay ahead for the Navy’s caregivers. The story is retold by Braisted himself, but a 2010 NIH report offers this shorter account:
. . . in the fourth dreadful year of the war, as the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) assumed fighting strength and prepared their first great offensive against the Germans, the flu struck. By the War Department’s most conservative count, influenza sickened 26% of the Army—more than one million men—and killed almost 30,000 before they even got to France.2,3 On both sides of the Atlantic, the Army lost a staggering 8,743,102 days to influenza among enlisted men in 1918.4 (p. 1448) The Navy recorded 5,027 deaths and more than 106,000 hospital admissions for influenza and pneumonia out of 600,000 men, but given the large number of mild cases that were never recorded, Braisted put the sickness rate closer to 40%.5,6 (p. 2458)
Meet at Las Margaritas
This note was sent to Billie at a time when Mark was selling his Phoenix house and reorganizing things for permanent residence in New York. In later years, DRU and Billie were civil at least, and sometimes shared reminiscences. This note makes reference to one of his unexplained absences when Mark was visiting Tucson..