Twilight Zone, Or Just Sort Of Happened?

I was laying underneath my friend’s toilet (see yesterday’s blog) fixing the screws that held the seat tight and worrying about getting the job done in time so I could rush home and write my weekly music column.

Only problem was: What am I going to write it about? I hadn’t the faintest idea. None at all. Except for a list of songs some old guy left with me that I used last week; there were some left and maybe I can pull out a column. Tokyo Rose used some of them on the radio during the war. Maybe I can do something about her.

So I did. “Orphan Ann,” as she called herself on the air, an American citizen visiting her parents when war broke out and she was stranded in Japan, forced to broadcast to the U.S. troops. There are some fine Internet sites which tell the real story about this woman who worked with the American POW’s to subvert the scripts written by the Japanese so they actually raised the troops’ morale, instead of lowering it.

It was published today, Friday. You know what? This is also the day, in 1977, that President Gerald Ford pardoned her. Huh.

Everybody has a story.
Robert Rowlands died the other day. He was a gunner on the USS Yorktown and fought in the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway where the Yorktown was sunk.