Daniel Griswold's Blog

Today would be my mother’s 100th birthday. Gail Griswold was born on June 13, 1924, in Sparta, WI, and she passed away on Thanksgiving Day, November 23, 2017, in West Salem, WI, age 93. She lived a life full of friendships, love of family, and service to her church and neighbors.

She and my Dad, Donald Griswold, were good parents and set an example for our entire extended family. They were truly part of “the Greatest Generation.” Among their legacies are three granddaughters, eight grandsons and 16 great grandchildren!

In honor of Mom, I’m posting favorite photos, the eulogy I gave at her funeral, an obituary from the Sauk Centre Herald, and a bonus anecdote about my Mom’s one shining moment in cribbage.

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Eulogy for Gail Griswold, West Salem Presbyterian Church, December 2, 2017, delivered by her son, Daniel Griswold:

Gail was the best mom, the best wife, the best sister, the best aunt, the best grandmother, and the best great grandmother.

Mom came from a humble background, but despite that or maybe because of that she appreciated the finer things in life. She was always well dressed and she kept a beautiful and hospitable home. She exposed me to things that I wouldn’t have naturally gravitated toward such as Russian literature and classical music.

She and Dad supported my education through college and graduate school. She gave us cars and furniture. I was always kind of afraid to mention a need to Mom because she would want to give us what she had.

She was a faithful wife to our dad. She cared for him in his final years and gave him the best home health care a man could have. As my dad said, she was his “phantom of delight.”

Mom gave us a great example of Christian service and humility. She served people through her work at the church, the nursing home, and as a hospice volunteer.

When I was a kid there were days when I would come home from the old West Salem Elementary School to our house on Youlon Street to find a young handicapped woman named Judy Berra sitting on our living room floor. Judy had a severe disability and was a resident at Mulder Nursing Home where Mom worked. Mom would bring her home so she could enjoy a few hours in a family home. She adored my mom. I’m told that Judy would be seen sitting on the floor at the nurses’ station hanging on my mom’s skirt.

Mom’s home was always our home whenever we had family gatherings. I know I speak for Harry when I say how much we enjoyed our gatherings in the summer at a cottage on Fairy Lake outside Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Like so many good things in life, it all happened kind of by accident.

Mom and Dad and I first rented the cottage when we moved from West Salem to Sauk Centre in the summer of 1971 because the house my parents bought wasn’t ready to move into yet. Mom and Dad rented the cottage every summer after that for 17 years.

We had such good times there with Mom and Dad and our kids. My family would stay in town at Mom and Dad’s, Harry’s family would stay out at the cottage, and John’s family in a local hotel. My dad, always setting a good example of the protestant work ethic, would never come out until 5 p.m. after he’d put in a full day at the newspaper.

Mom was so competent and capable for her entire life up until the last year and a half or so that it was sometimes hard for her to accept not always being able to remember what she wanted to. A couple of years ago we were talking on the phone and she was trying to remember something about me and was getting things confused with my three older brothers.

She said,  “Sometimes I think I had one kid too many.”

I said, “Mom, I wouldn’t put it quite like that!”

My Mom was a faithful Christian woman. She read the Bible and prayed and served the church her entire adult life.

There are two passages in the Bible that whenever I read them I think of our dear mother. In Matthew 25, Jesus tells the parable of the talents. The point of the story is not who has the most talents, but who makes the most of the talents their master has given them.

Mom was a woman of ability and accomplishment, but she had to overcome a childhood that was poor even by the standards of the Great Depression. My mom took those talents God gave her and made the most of them. She worked to put herself through nursing school during the war. She and dad created a loving, stable, middle-class home for us four boys.

In the parable of the talents, the master calls on his servant who was given two talents to give an account of what they had done with what God had given them:

And the servant also who had the two talents came forward, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me two talents; here, I have made two talents more.’ The master said to the servant, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ 

The other passage that always makes me think of Mom is Psalm 23. She told me when I was a kid that she loved that Psalm because of the beautiful language, especially the King James Version. It’s also a fitting psalm for my mother’s life–for the challenges she faced, the trust she put in God, and her hope in the life to come.

The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul;
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil;
For Thou art with me;
Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
Thou anoint my head with oil;
My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
All the days of my life;
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord Forever.

We love you, Mom. Enjoy your eternal reward in the house of the Lord.

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Mom grew up playing cribbage with her father, my Grandpa Twining. And at some point in my childhood she passed along the rules of the game. We would usually play a few games whenever I came home to visit.

If you’ve never played cribbage, it’s a card game where you keep score by moving pegs along a board. The boards can come in all sorts of styles, but they all have 60 or 120 holes per player. The winner is the first person to cross the finish line at 120 points. A typical hand will score four to eight points, and anything over 20 is worth celebrating.

Mom told me that in one game with her own dad, when she was probably a teen-ager, she scored a 29– the absolute top score possible in cribbage and a very rare hand. According to Google, in the two-person games we typically play, “The odds of getting a perfect 29 hand in cribbage are 1 in 216,580…” * Mom said that her dad was so excited about her feat that he told everybody in town. Spreading of the news probably started downtown in Krome’s Bar.

As a postscript, I sometimes play cribbage with my kids when they visit. When my daughter Emily and I played in March, we used the well-worn board my mother passed along to me. I can’t remember if she told me for sure, but I like to think it’s the board on which she counted off her legendary 29!

Left: Emily and I playing cribbage in March on my Mom’s old board. Right: A cribbage board Elizabeth and I saw in September 2022 at the Maritime Museum in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was fashioned by a ship’s carpenter from a piece of oak from the Titanic.

* Again, from a website turned up by Google: “A perfect hand is 29 points, and it happens when a player holds three fives and a jack, then obtains the other five when the “cut” card is turned over. The final five must be the same suit as the jack.”

The behavioral economist Daniel Khaneman passed away at age 90 earlier this spring. I finally got around to reading his 2011 bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, last fall and gained a lot of insight from it, both for my personal life and for public policy.

Most of us would consider it more of a compliment to be called a fast thinker than a slow one, but the book helped me understand that we often jump to conclusions too quickly when we should slow down and be more deliberate and methodical in how we make decisions. Our intuitions often lead us astray.

The core theme of the book is what Kahneman calls “a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight” (p. 13).

This weakness in our human nature gives rise to the phenomenon we often observe in the public arena: that the less people actually know about a subject, the more confident they are in their opinions. (This even has a name: “the Dunning-Kruger effect.”) It explains why the much-derided experts can seem to hedge their opinions. It’s not that they are intentionally waffling, but that they can see better than most that particular circumstances can be complicated and nuanced.

“Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance,” the author writes on p. 201. That’s something I need to remind myself of more often.

Kahneman argues that we would be better off, as individuals and as a society, it we relied more on statistical averages and algorithms rather than intuitive judgments. (The dictionary defines an algorithm as “a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.”) Statistics can offer a base-line probability for assessing risk, a measure of real-world outcomes as opposed to our preconceived notions.

When we combine the broader frame of reference that statistics allow with an algorithm, we make better decisions. The author agrees with proponents of algorithms who “have argued strongly that it is unethical to rely on intuitive judgments for important decisions if an algorithm is available that will make fewer mistakes. …simple, statistical rules are superior to intuitive ‘clinical’ judgments” (pp. 229-30). To me, this all argues for using artificial intelligence to analyze problems and guide our decision making. No system is perfect, but relying on well-informed algorithms can help us avoid the pitfalls of our own distorted judgments.

Another weakness in our all-too-human judgments is that we tend to exaggerate low-probability outcomes, on the good side and the bad side. That means we can over-insure against risks that have a low enough probability that we could safely ignore them as a practical matter. It also means we tend to exaggerate our chances of winning the lottery. Both assumptions can cost us money and lost opportunities—as individuals and collectively.

Kahneman cites the jurist Cass Sunstein, who’s criticized the European Union’s “precautionary principle” as an example of over-weighting potential risks to society. A strict interpretation of the rule threatens to paralyze potentially beneficial innovations. Sunstein lists a number of accepted innovations that would not have passed the test if it had been enforced in the past, including “airplanes, air conditioning, antibiotics, automobiles, chlorine, the measles vaccine, open-heart surgery, radio, refrigeration, smallpox vaccine, and X-rays” (p. 351).

Kahneman’s insights have a lot of applications in day-to-day life. If you watch sports on TV, you’ve probably heard announces say a certain player who’s made a few shots in a row has a “hot hand.” But the author cites research that shows what we think is a pattern is really just a random variation. Steph Curry can nail five 3-pointers in a row, but that can be just as random as flipping a coin and having it come up heads five times in a row. The next flip (or shot) is no more likely to come up heads (or go in) than any of the last five. Khaneman writes that we “are consistently too quick to perceive order and causality in randomness” (p. 116).

[I tested this idea with a Python program that simulated a basketball player shooting dozens, hundreds, even thousands of shots in a row. If you program in a 40 percent chance of making a 3-point shot, and feed through randomly generated numbers, sure enough it will show the virtual player making five, six, seven shots in a row, but then missing a bunch in a row as well. The strings of makes and misses my program produced were neither hot nor cold, but just random.]

Kahneman applies this insight to the casino. We’re all too prone to the “Gambler’s fallacy,” the belief that after a long run of red on the roulette wheel, black is now “due.” In fact, the odds are still exactly the same. He writes: “Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not ‘corrected’ as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted” (p. 422).

The book argues for “broad framing”— considering the total outcomes over multiple events, not just what might happen today. This is why we should buy high-deductible insurance, skip extended warranties, and not check our stock portfolio very often. Regarding stocks, the insights from the book argue for the “random walk” approach of owning a broad portfolio of stocks and holding them for the long run.

We tend to fear the loss of a certain amount more than we desire gaining the same amount—what Kahneman’s profession calls “loss aversion.” To get someone to risk losing $100 if a coin flip comes up tails, studies show you need to offer them at least $200 if it comes up heads. This is why an exhaustive study found that “professional golfers putt more accurately for par than for a birdie” (p. 300). The pain of a bogey outweighs the pleasure of birdie. It’s why consumers will accept a cash discount at the gas station but will rebel at a credit-card surcharge, even if the outcome is the same.

I could go on about the insights from this book. It made me think more deeply and I hope more slowly and methodically about the decisions I make every day. May I be more humble in my judgments as I try to make sense of this complex world we live in.

The Isle of Man will stay in my memory as a pastoral patch of green hills set in the Irish Sea, alive with the history of steam trains, castles and a Viking heritage of self-rule going back a thousand years.

Looking for a field trip during our extended stay in the north of England, Elizabeth and I set off by ferry last week to spend four days on the Isle of Man. We arrived from Liverpool late in the evening of Sunday, October 15. Walking along the promenade the next morning, we found a statue of the three famous Gibb brothers—Barry, Maurice, and Robin, aka The Bee Gees. They were born on the Isle of Man but then moved with their family first to Manchester and then to Australia. Next to the statue was inscribed a famous 1854 poem, “Ellan Vallin,” which is the name of the island in Manx Gaelic. The poem was set to music later in the century and has become the island’s unofficial national anthem. It was performed beautifully by Robin Gibb and the Bee Gees themselves in 1998. (See the YouTube video at the end of the post.)

We then hopped on a bus for the town of Port Erin on the southwest end of the island. We were encouraged by a nice lady at the visitors center to hire a cab when we got there to go on to tip of the island to a café overlooking The Sound and the small Isle of Calf. Alas, there was no taxi or Uber service available, so we walked to the end of the village overlooking a bay and the Milner Tower in the distance. Then we headed to the Isle of Man Steam Railway Station in town where we toured the small railway museum before boarding the train for Castletown on the way back to Douglas.

The Isle of Man Steam Railway dates back to 1873 and runs 15 miles between Douglas and Port Erin. It was great fun to ride the train as it chugged along at 25 mph beside the sheep fields and along the coast. We were able to ride for part of the way in the “Guard’s Van,” the car at the front behind the locomotive. The whistle would blast at road crossings and the smoke billow through underpasses. At the railway museum we learned that the Rev. Wilbert V. Awdry, the author of the Thomas the Tank Engine books we read to our kids, was inspired by the trains on the island. So that is two cultural icons connected to the Isle of Man!

We jumped off the train in Castletown along the island’s east coast to visit the Castle Rushen. Parts of the castle date back to the 1200s A.D. but most of it was built in the 1400s. We arrived there about 45 minutes before closing, too late to make it worth the entry fee, but the nice lady in the visitor’s shop waved us through for a brief tour. The views of the town and countryside were lovely. Many of the rooms were set up as though the castle residents were entertaining their guests. (See Elizabeth joining in!) The castle was one of the strongholds of the island’s government for centuries.

On Tuesday morning, we boarded the Manx Electric Railway in Douglas for a trip to the northeast end of the island. Along the way we stopped at Laxey to board the electric railway that goes to the summit of Snaefill. The peak is the highest on the island, 2,036 feet above sea level. On the way up we could see the Laxey Wheel, the largest water wheel in Britain. It was built in 1854 to pump water out of the nearby mines. Further up we could see the Snaefell Mine, where the train recording told us 20 miners died in 1897 from carbon monoxide poisoning. As we drew nearer to the summit, we entered the cloud cover and when we reached the top, the winds were blowing at 45 mph! As you can see from the video, it was a wind that could blow you off your feet. On a clear day you are supposed to be able to see “Seven Kingdoms” from the summit—the Isle of Man, Wales, England, Scotland, Ireland, the Sea and the Heavens. On that day we could barely see one! Back at the Laxey station was Christ Church, built by and for the miners in 1856 out of stone produced by the mines. The mines there produced lead, zinc, copper and silver for export to England and Wales.

Back on the train heading north we climbed the hills for beautiful vistas of the Irish Sea. We alighted from the train at an isolated station called Ballajora. From there we walked about 25 minutes through the countryside to visit a church and cemetery at the small village of Moughhold. The Kirk Maughold Church there is surrounded by a graveyard known as “God’s Acre” and a large collection of historical Celtic crosses. One of the more notable ones can be found in the Manx Museum in Douglas (see below). We ended the rail journey at Ramsey, where we had soup and a dessert and walked along the waterfront. We then hopped a bus back to Douglas, where I cheered the England football team in the otherwise quiet Thirsty Pigeon pub as it beat Italy 3-1.

On Wednesday, we caught a bus for Peel on the west side of the island. Along its rugged coast, on the small St. Patrick’s Island, sits Peel Castle. This is one of the most sublime spots we’ve visited. It’s hard to beat the combination of impressive ruins of a fort and cathedral set alongside rocks and green hills and the sea. The castle’s round tower and first chapel date from the 10th and 11th centuries A.D. and the larger St. German Cathedral from 1200s. Over the centuries, St. Patrick’s Island has housed priests, prisoners, soldiers, and lords. We went from the castle to a waterfront kiosk where we ate a lunch of tea and chip baps (French fries in a bun—yumm!).

In the afternoon, we wandered through the House of Manannan, a museum in Peel with interesting life-sized displays of early life on the island, highlighting its Viking heritage. From the bus window on the way back to Douglas, we caught a view of Tynwald Hill in St. Johns. Tynwald (Old Norse for “assembly field”) is the original governing body of the island dating back to the period of Viking rule more than a thousand years ago. It is claimed to be the oldest continually sitting parliamentary body in the world and it still governs the internal affairs of the island, a self-governing British Crown Dependency. The Tynwald now meets in Douglas but every year on July 5 it assembles at Tynwald Hill where new laws are read and the public can present petitions. We saw film footage of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip participating one year.

On Thursday, our last morning on the island, we walked to the Manx Museum in Douglas. It was full of interesting displays about the island’s history and natural features. Among the more interesting items: a 1970s Hacker record player once owned by Maurice Gibb; a Celtic cross from Moughold dated to the eighth or early ninth century A.D.; and a necklace of colorful beads found in the grave of a woman who was buried around 930 A.D. near the cathedral at Peel Castle. The woman is known as “The Pagan Lady” because Christians at the time were not normally buried with objects.

From the museum we stopped at the hotel to gather our things and head to the terminal to catch our 2 p.m. ferry back to Liverpool. The island is served by the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company Limited, which dates back to 1830. The crossing covers about a hundred miles and took us 3 hours and 15 minutes. It was smooth sailing, with some rain and a brief rainbow as a reward. The Irish Sea between the island and England is not that deep. The island was actually connected to England by a land bridge as recently as 8,000 years ago as the last ice age receded. We arrived in Liverpool on time and with the setting sun breaking through just enough to illuminate my meeting with another famous group of musicians born near the shores of the Irish Sea.

And finally a few loose ends from our visit:

The island uses the British pound as its currency but it issues its own versions of coins and paper currency. A young man at a store told us that while British currency is accepted on the island, people back in Britain don’t always accept Manx currency. (That’s Castle Rushen on the back of the Manx five pound note.)

We didn’t see any Manx cats while we were there. We were told by a lady at the Manx Museum that they are around, but that they are a minority among cats.

“60 Minutes” ran a segment on the Isle of Man and its famous annual TT motorcycle race this past Sunday, Oct. 22, 2023. The first half provides background on the island and its history and the second half is about the race, which is one of the most dangerous in the world.

You can listen to lots of versions of the island’s unofficial anthem “Ellan Vallin” on Spotify, but the version by the Bee Gees is among the most moving. Below is the video with some engaging banter with the audience, along with the original poem.

In more than 25 years of living and working on the East Coast, one of the most annoying phrases I hear is “flyover country.” Certain East and West coasters use it to refer to the country they see out the window (if they bother to look) as they fly over at 30,000 feet on their way between important meetings on either side of the country. The term annoys me because, for one, I grew up in flyover country, including small towns in Wisconsin and Minnesota. I’m also more culturally and politically conservative than the coastal elites, so I have an affinity for “Main Street America.” And every time I travel to and through the heartland of America, I meet people and see places that make me even more grateful to be a citizen of this great country.

My most recent experience in flyover country was a long cross-country drive Elizabeth and I took this summer from Northern Virginia through Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas to Colorado and back again. The last time I’d driven that far across the middle of the country was more than 40 years ago, when I drove from Baltimore to Colorado Springs in February 1983 to start my new job as editorial page editor of the daily Gazette Telegraph. Now that we’re both retired, Elizabeth and I had the time to drive there again, this time to visit our son Michael and his family.

Among the highlights of the drive were a few days in St. Louis to see our dear friend Berta. We took Berta and her 94-year-old mother on the special tram to the top of the Gateway Arch for great views of the city and the Mississippi River more than 600 feet below. The visitor center near the arch contains an excellent museum on the city and its role in settling of the West. And down the street I stole away for an hour to take in the Economy Museum at the headquarters of the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

A few miles southwest of the central city is White Haven, a plantation and National Historic Site where Ulysses S Grant and his wife Julia lived with the Dent family in-laws from 1854-59. Grant would argue with his slave-owning father-in-law around the dinner table about abolition and the brewing conflict between north and south. The site contains another fine museum with facts and artifacts about Grant’s life and service to the country as Civil War general and president. The displays deepened the respect I’ve had for Grant ever since reading Ron Chernow’s splendid biography a few years ago. Influenced by Lincoln, Grant not only wanted to see black Americans fully integrated into the life of our nation but his inclusive views also extended to immigrants. I especially liked this quote on display from July 28, 1872, when he was president:

My oft expressed desire is that all citizens, white or black, native or foreign born, may be left free, in all parts of our common country, to vote, speak & act, in obedience to law, without intimidation or ostracism on account of his views, color or nativity.

A friend of ours out east who hails from Kansas recommended we stop along the way at the Flint Hills Discovery Center in Manhattan, Kansas. The exhibits there opened my eyes to a region of the country that I was totally ignorant of. The Flint Hills run north and south through the eastern part of the state. The shallow, rocky soil made the hills unsuitable for crop farming, so they have remained the largest and one the last areas of tall-grass prairie. We stopped at the center on a July day when the truck thermometer read 106 F, so we enjoyed the air conditioning along with the exhibits. As we made our way west from there, we stopped at the Buffalo Bill Cultural Center near Oakley to pay respects to the famous cowboy and then drove about 30 minutes south to admire the Monument Rocks.  

On our way back through Kansas a few weeks later, we stopped at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, also in the Flint Hills about 70 miles south of Manhattan. The preserve covers 11,000 acres of tall grass and supports about 100 reintroduced bison.  We took a ranger-guided ride through the preserve, where we saw a herd of bison from a distance and one male as close up as the ranger allowed us. We also stopped overnight to stay with the parents of our Kansas friend at their farmhouse near Buhler. Soybeans, corn, and sorghum were the main crops growing in the fields in that part of Kansas. Buhler, population 1,325, reminded me a bit of my hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, with its grain elevator and friendly downtown. We ate breakfast at the Mustard Seed Café, where locals were gathering to start the day. It brought back pleasant memories of visiting my aging parents in Sauk Centre, where I would occasionally join my dad and his circle of friends for coffee at the Main Street Café.

In the high plains of Colorado, as we were heading back east, we meandered along unpaved roads to the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site about 30 miles southeast of Kit Carson. On November 29, 1864, 700 volunteer troops attacked a peaceful encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians along Sand Creek. Hundreds were killed and some of the bodies mutilated. It was a sobering reminder of our nation’s checkered history in dealing with the native population. It was also an opportunity to walk across the high prairie with its big sky and no sounds other than the surrounding chorus of cicadas.

The final highlight of our drive was the Winston Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri. I’d seen the sign for it on our way out and made a mental note to stop there on the way back. Elizabeth and I agreed it was one of the best museums we’d ever visited. We spent nearly three hours viewing the exhibits of Churchill’s life and his famous visit to Fulton in March 1946. He was invited by Westminster College to give an address, and he chose that moment to warn the Western alliance about the “iron curtain” descending across the heart of Europe. It was considered a milestone in the Cold War with the Soviet Union that would last until the end of the 1980s. Eight sections of the Berlin Wall have been relocated outside the museum.

I hope these brief notes will kindle a bit of wanderlust to go not just to the big cities of coastal America but to visit the vast expanse in between. In just one trip we saw bison, sprawling prairie, small town charms, ripening fields, and three special places woven into our nation’s history.

Irene Worthington of Diggle passed away peacefully at Royal Oldham Hospital on September 8, 2023, age 84.

Irene was a devoted Christian and a steward at Delph Methodist Church for more than 40 years. She was a regular at the Saturday coffee mornings and helped to lead the worship services. She worked hard all her life, raising three children, running her own shop, working in a factory, cleaning homes, and serving the church. She loved to travel, frequently visiting her daughter and grandchildren in the United States, the Greek island of Halki with her late husband Graeme Worthington, and her longtime friend Jean in New Zealand in 2002. She made many friends in Saddleworth with her easy smile, caring spirit and warm hospitality.

Irene was born 24 October 1938 to Asa and Mary Elizabeth Cook (nee Wilcock) at 21 Linden Ave., Greenacres.  Irene’s mother died from a fall when Irene was three and her father was interned in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during World War II—leaving her and her brothers Asa and Brian in care of her paternal grandparents. Her father returned from the war in 1946. He remarried and he and his wife Winnie had three children, Irene’s half-sisters Pat and Rita and half-brother Peter. 

When Irene was 18 she married Ian Waddington and lived at Waterworks Road, Waterhead. They had three children, Mark, Elizabeth, and Louise. The family moved to Hollinhall St., Clarksfield, and then to Huddersfield Rd., where they bought and ran a shop for about six years.  After she and Ian divorced, she married her second husband, Les Goodwin, in 1975. They moved to Delph in 1979 and spent more than 20 very happy years there. Les passed away in 2000. In 2010 Irene married Graeme Worthington and moved to Diggle, but sadly in 2016 Graham passed away.

Irene became a Christian at 17 and was very involved with teaching Sunday school at Waterhead Congregational Church and was involved in church activities throughout her life. In Delph she embraced the Methodist faith and was a steward for more than 40 years up to age 82, taking part in meetings in the church and with other churches. 

Irene also had some wonderful holidays in the Norfolk Broads, Malta, the United States, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand and lots of other places. Her daughter Elizabeth lives in the United States and they would take her on sight-seeing trips when she visited. In 2002 she traveled to New Zealand to see her school friend and stayed for three months. It was a wonderful trip and she was able to travel the whole of New Zealand. The island of Halki in Greece was a fun favorite and she was privileged to go there often with Graeme and his family.

During her time in Diggle, Irene became a real member of Graeme’s family and the number of her family members has grown over the years to three biological children, three stepchildren–Alice, Hilary, and Ray–and their families, five grandchildren and spouses, and four great grandchildren. During COVID, Irene wrote, “God has been good to me. For 12 months I’ve been housebound, but never alone. I know He is always beside me so I give Him thanks for all my blessings.”

[This story was based in large part on notes Irene left behind, including “My Life in a Nutshell.”]

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Baby Boomers like me prefer to read books on their Kindles while their children and grandchildren prefer real books made of cloth and paper. It seems like it should be the other way around, but I can understand the appeal of both modes of reading.

When I bought my first Kindle more than a decade ago, it soon became my primary way of reading books. I even joked for a while that “I don’t read books anymore” and imagined the day that my bookshelves would be mostly empty and brick-and-mortar bookstores would all be closed.

What I’ve like most about the Kindle is its portability, self-illumination, and note-taking ability. If I go on a trip, this device weighing just a few ounces can literally carry a library of hundreds of books and articles. This is especially useful if it spares me toting a thousand-page tome that can weigh 2 or 3 pounds. In pre-Covid days, while standing on a packed Metro train into work, I could hold on to a pole with one hand and read from my Kindle with the other.

The self-lighting means I don’t need to find a bright corner to read. The “paper white” technology is really amazing in how it backlights the pages. This can allow reading in unusual places! In September 2020, on a backpacking adventure in Colorado, I read a few pages of James Joyce’s Dubliners as I settled for the night in my small tent at 10,700 feet. It would have been awkward to read a real book under an electric lamp (as well as carrying the additional weight in my backpack). Self-lighting also helps if you want to read in bed without disturbing a spouse who can’t sleep with the lights on.

With the Kindle, I can easily highlight passages and type in notes or comments on the page I’m reading. I know I can do the same with a pen or pencil in a real book, but with the Kindle I can download the highlights and notes to my laptop. This is especially useful if I’m writing a review for the blog or a publication. The Kindle allows me to export my notes via email, and then I can cut and paste them into a Word document. No retyping required.

As a bonus, the Kindle allows me to look up unfamiliar words instantly and it even keeps them stored in a “Vocabulary Builder” list that you can review in the form of flash cards. Over the years I’ve accumulated about 700 words on my list, e.g. palimpsest, aperitif, phlogiston, escutcheon, impecunious, objurgate, alpenglow, and gewgaw. (OK, I can already imagine some readers thinking, “He doesn’t know what THAT word means?”)

Despite all those advantages, I’ve found myself in recent years turning back to old fashioned books for more of my reading. Yes, there really is something pleasurable about turning paper pages in a book resting on your lap. And since I retired in 2020, I’ve had more time to sit in my favorite chaise lounge at the end of the sofa under a bright LED bulb. Reading on the Metro is no longer a factor.

While a new printed book is usually a few dollars more expensive than the Kindle version, a used printed copy is usually cheaper. To save money, I often order used books from third-party vendors on Amazon. I’ll also browse the basement of the Freeman Store and Museum in Vienna with its collection of used history, biography and fiction books (hardback $2, paperback $1).

If a book is heavy in photos or graphs, a real book is better. Kindle can display graphs and tables, but not in color and not always in a convenient format. Real books can also be more easily loaned or given away than Kindle books. And physical books are better in a reading group. If someone refers to “the quote at the bottom of page 179,” I can more quickly turn to it with an actual book than with a Kindle.

Real books do take up a lot of space and they’re heavy to move. We still have a few hundred on the bookshelves in our living room and more children’s books stored in a closet. I’ve culled our books in recent years by sending photos of them to people I know and asking if they want them for free. (See the photo below that I recently sent out.) I also drop them off at the Freeman Store or at a charity shop for resale. To prevent books from accumulating, I try to follow a “just in time” inventory approach by not buying one unless I’m planning to read it in the next three months. The Goodreads website is a great way to keep a virtual library of books that I might want to read one day without actually buying the books. (My “Want to Read” list has grown to an overly ambitious 494 and is probably due for a cull itself.)

I’ll still buy and read books on Kindle, but they’ve become the exception rather than the rule. Of the 40 books I read last year, 5 were on the Kindle. Of the 20 I’ve read so far this year, 4 have been on Kindle. So as an economist would say, my “revealed preference” is for physical books. But I can go either way, depending on the book and circumstances. When you’re lost in a good read, it doesn’t really matter how the words are formed before your eyes, whether by ink or electrons!

Elizabeth and I hit the road at the end of May for a six-day, 2,000-mile driving trip to my birth state of Wisconsin and back.

On the way out, we stayed overnight in Elkhart, Indiana, known as the “RV Capital of the World.” More than 80 percent of RVs built in the world are made in Elkhart County, so it’s the fitting home of the RV/Mobile Home Museum and Hall of Fame. As readers know, Elizabeth and I saw a lot of the United States and Canada in our 30-foot travel trailer in 2021-22. (We sold it in January.) Since we were just passing through town for the night, we weren’t able to visit the museum, but we were impressed with Elkhart’s thriving downtown and riverfront. (Two other museums we saw signs for on our trip but were not able to visit were the Sock Monkey Museum near Rockford Ill. and the Museum of Root Beer in Wisconsin Dells, Wis.!)

Between Elkhart and Chicago, along the shore of Lake Michigan, lies the Indiana Dunes National Park. It was only about 10 minutes off the freeway. We took the 1-mile Dune Succession Trail Loop, climbing the wooded steps that carried us over Diana’s Dune and down to the lakefront. The beach was clean and spotted with tourists willing to brave the water. The top of Lake Michigan lies 307 miles to north and the visible skyline of Chicago 28 miles to the west northwest. You can see the outlines of factories along the coast in either direction. Indiana Dunes became a national lakeshore in 1966 and a national park only in 2019 when then-President Trump signed an omnibus spending bill.

Our journey continued with an overnight stop in Chicago, a place Elizabeth had never visited. In our short time there we managed to see the Chicago Institute of Art, eat deep dish pizza at Giordanos, and cruise the Chicago River and Lake Michigan at dusk. Among the buildings we admired was the St. Regis, Chicago (formerly the Wanda Vista Tower), a 101-story, 1,198-foot-tall residential building completed in 2020 that is the tallest skyscraper in the world designed by a woman (Jeanne Gang). The curves were achieved not by bending any metal but by setting each floor a few inches off from the one below it. And we could not escape the ever-present Donald Trump, whose name adorns another tall building along the river. To pass from the river to the lake, all boats must transit a huge lock that was originally designed to keep the mucky river water from polluting the cleaner lake that was the source of the city’s drinking water. The lock is so large that several ships and boats can collect inside it before it’s raised or lowered.

On our third day, Saturday, May 28, we reached my birthplace of La Crosse County, Wisconsin. I haven’t lived there for 45 years, but I relish the memories of growing up there and the beauty of the “Coulee Region.” We were there to attend an extended-family dinner Saturday night and a memorial service on Sunday for a second cousin of mine. He was being laid to rest in the Griswold section of Hamilton Cemetery in my hometown of West Salem. My cousin was a Navy veteran, so it was the fourth memorial I’ve attended there with the military honors of a gun salute and taps. (The other three were for my dad and two of my older brothers.) The cemetery is near where my great grandfather Henry Daniel Griswold established a dairy farm in the 1870s. The family sold the farm in the 1950s and its fertile land has since become a subdivision, with Griswold Avenue the only remaining link to the family.

Later Sunday afternoon, Elizabeth and I drove to the top of Grandad Bluff, which stands 700 feet above La Crosse and the Mississippi River Valley. In contrast to the flat prairies of central Minnesota, where I also lived as a kid, western Wisconsin is marked by wooded hills and valleys, known as coulees. It’s called the “Driftless Area,” for reasons I should have learned as a fourth-grader at West Salem Elementary School if I had been a more diligent student! Providing remedial education was one of the display panels on Grandad Bluff that read:

THE DRIFTLESS AREA OF WISCONSIN

Casting a glance up and down the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi River Valley from Grandad Bluff, you can see a portion of the geological region called the Driftless Area. Its ridge-and-valley topography is both beautiful and distinct: there are narrow, steep valleys leading down to larger rivers, winding networks of spring fed streams, and craggy, forested bluffs punctuated with isolated remnants of oak savanna and prairie. The area measures approximately 10,000 square miles and covers much of the southwestern corner of the state. La Crosse is situated on its western edge.

The Driftless Area’s defining characteristic is that it was not covered by the thick ice sheets that advanced out of Canada numerous times over the past 2.6 million years. During the last glacial period about 30,000 years ago, the “Late Wisconsin Glaciation,” ice extended south from Canada. Diverted by the highlands of north-central Wisconsin, the ice sheets bypassed the southwestern section of the state. This created an unglaciated area which looks markedly different from the surrounding regions. Rather than having its hills smoothed over and river valleys filled with glacial sediment, or “drift,” the Driftless Area retained its rugged ridge-and-valley topography. …

Looking around from the top of Grandad Bluff, you can see an immense plateau of the Driftless Area, with numerous narrow, steep valleys carved into it over the millennia by rivers and streams. Locally, these small valleys are known as “coulees,” a term derived from the French word “couler,” to flow. This expression has given rise in recent decades to the name “Coulee Region,” describing the greater La Crosse area.

On the trip home, we stopped at another of the lesser-known national parks, Cuyahoga Valley N.P. in Ohio, south of Cleveland. We didn’t have time to visit the main area of the park, but 10 minutes off the freeway we parked at the trailhead for a 1.4-mile loop hike to Brandywine Falls. The trail taking us to the 60-foot falls descended to a bridge across Brandywine Creek and then up to a walkway that took me to an overlook of the falls. Along the way we saw ducks and a big heron in the creek. On a return trip it might be fun to ride bikes along the canal tow path that runs through the main valley. This park is also relatively new. Originally set aside as a National Recreation Area in 1974, it was redesignated a national park in 2000. Although our time was short in both Indiana Dunes and Cuyahoga Valley NPs, our spontaneous stops allowed me to check off no. 34 and no. 35 in national parks I’ve visited. Only 28 more to go!