Jim’s Writings

I recently reviewed The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama for our church newsletter, HUU Review. this is just the first paragraph:

Barack Obama covers the waterfront in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope — politics, race, faith, values, international relations, family, the struggles of the poor and the middle class in this country and around the world. A former professor of Constitutional law, he discusses the long history in the development and interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

You can read the rest of the review at the HUU Community Cafe.

My talk today is based on a series of three articles I wrote for the Associated Press back in 1952.The subject was the increasing powers of the office of Governor of Virginia, under the ever-changing State Constitution.. Those stories in turn were based on a small volume written in 1942 and published on order of the Virginia General Assembly. The author was Blake Tyler Newton and the title was The Governor of as Business Manager.”

There have, of course, been changes in the governor’s powers since 1942, so I have sought to bring the subject up to date, mainly by consulting a brand new book just published this year, entitled The Constitution of Virginia. The author is Dr. John J. Dinan of Wake Forest University. I also consulted with the reference department of the Library of Virginia.

Our Governor today is a very powerful executive. But it hasn’t always been that way. The first Governor under the constitution was the great patriot, Patrick Henry. The Virginia Convention elected him Governor on June 29, 1776, the same day it proclaimed the new constitution. He had virtually no power, nor did Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and the other early governors. They were virtual figureheads, appointed by the General Assembly and by implication subservient to that body. Continue Reading »

Talk delivered by JJG before a James Madison University journalism class (14 women, one man) Monday, November 14, 2005.

This is quite a pleasure for me, talking about reporting with a group of young aspirant newspersons. The proportion of sexes is a little surprising. Don’t young men want to be newsmen any more?

Well, I was a newsman for 16 years, first on a newspaper and then with the Associated Press. I’ll try to interest you with some of my experiences and some of the lessons I learned.

First of all, I must to tell you, this is my half year birthday. I am 91 ½ years old today. So if I refer frequently to my notes, you will understand.

Secondly, I left reporting in 1958. That’s when your parents were little children. So today’s use by reporters of computers, cell phones, and recorders, and all the rest is all foreign to me.

I believe, though, that good reporting doesn’t change, no matter what aids you use. It involves accuracy, truth, and recognizing the difference between news and fluff. Years ago, I was told, that a professor of journalism at Washington and Lee would often end his lectures by saying: accuracy, dammit, accuracy.

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Presented at  HUU Meeting
January 7, 1990
By James J. Geary

Wade asked me to talk, for not more than seven minutes, on my view of life after death. To do it justice I think I would need to go into my whole philosophy of being, and there is not time for that. But I’ll make a stab at it anyway.

I was given for Christmas this diary of H. L. Mencken, the so-called sage of Baltimore. I quote from the introduction by the editor:

"He had not a vestige of belief in an afterlife, but wrote, catalogued, and left behind him an enormous quantity of records so that those who came after him in this life would have an accurate picture of him."

Now to me those records are Mencken’s afterlife, or rather a small part of it. Everything he wrote in life, everything he did, that had an influence on others, an influence on a fly or a rock, was part of his afterlife. That influence goes on and on, like ripples from a stone dropped in a pond. It becomes a part of the universe, as of course was Mencken himself; and, of course, as are you and I.

Each of us is a part of the universe. (I don’t like that word "part." Maybe "portion," or "fragment," or even "aspect" would be better.) Each of us is a portion or an aspect of the universe, just as is a mountain, or a sea, or, and this is a better comparison, a cloud. It is quite apparent to us that a cloud continually changes, from moment to moment, just as we do, just as a mountain does. Yet the cloud, and we, and the mountain, are portions of the Universe.

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The last vocation I ever thought I would be involved in is teaching. But a teacher I became — for a memorable three weeks. It was in a remote one-room school in the mountains of Montgomery county Virginia. I had about 18 students enrolled in six grades. Six of the 18 were only five years old, too young to be enrolled in school but their parents had sent them anyway.

This was in the fall of 1938, the year I graduated from the University of Virginia. It was a recession year, recession within the Great Depression, and jobs were very scarce. It had been a discouraging time for me. I spent some time during the summer with my Uncle Riner and his family in Buffalo hoping to find employment there. I visited my cousin Elizabeth and her husband Jack Beckert in Rochester, and was interviewed there by the personnel director for Eastman Kodak.

I returned to Roanoke to take a temporary job my Aunt Vedy had arranged for me in a plant manufacturing tomato cans. It was an assembly line job. I stood at the head of the line by a machine that rapidly picked up flat pieces of tin, one by one, and sent them along the line where they would be curved, sealed, and a bottom attached. My job was two-fold. I stacked the flat pieces of tin into an enclosure from which a great metal claw would snatch them up, two or three a second, and send them on their way. If the machine jammed, which it frequently did, I would strike a lever to stop the machine and then take huge pliers to pull out the crumpled pieces of tin. The faster I hit the lever, the fewer pieces got crumpled. The only satisfaction I got on the job was seeing how fast I could stop the machine once it jammed.

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A talk delivered by James J. Geary
before the Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalist congregation
15 November 1998

Good morning again, survivors! And congratulations!

We are all survivors, are we not?

(Story - not sure what was read)

So he didn’t survive. But we have — at least so far. Survival and security is the topic of this talk ; but it is also about ancestors, and children, and the celebration of life.

First I would like for us to take a look at some remarkable aspects of survival. Not only have we survived, but our parents had to survive, at least until we came along, or we wouldn’t be here would we.

And our grandparents were survivors, and their parents and grand-parents — at least to the reproductive age.

So I guess we are made of the right stuff; and they were made of the right stuff. And then, too, just maybe they were pretty darn lucky. Luck is a big thing in this world.

But you know what , it was not just our immediate ancestors who have survived to the reproductive age. It’s our ancestors for the past…thousand years? million years? no, it’s our ancestors for the past billion years or so!

And there has not been a single break in that almost endless chain — or rather I should say in those almost endless chains, because for each of us there have been thousands, millions of ancestral chains — not a single break in any one of them for a thousand million years, and more.

If just one of the vast number of ancestral lines that each of us has, had a break, we would not be who we are. We’d be somebody else.

I don’t know about you, but that just boggles my mind — to coin a phrase. I have a hard time taking that in: not a single break for billions of generations, even back to our ancestors who were little wiggly things in the sea; and even before that.

So, for us and for our billions of ancestors, it has been a pretty benign world — a pretty benign world.

But is it a benign world?

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Talk Delivered by James J. Geary before the Harrisonburg Unitarian
Universalist Church
Sunday, April 1, 2001
Centering time II (spiritual music)

[As I turned on the music, I said "April Fool." It was What a Beautiful World by Louis Armstrong  When it finished, I remarked that it was not April Fool after all; that the quot;Satchmo" really did give us a spiritual song. I then went right into my talk]

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world! And I think, what a world of beauty! This talk, or sermon if you please, is about beauty. Its about how beauty gives me — and I hope you — what for want of a better term, I shall call spiritual uplift. It’s also about the wonderful world we live in.

Some forty years ago I came across a brief supplication — a sort of supplication to oneself. It has remained with me all these years, and I often repeat it to myself. It goes like this: Stay with me, beauty, as the fire grows cold. Now, I don’t know what that meant, exactly, to its author. But I know what it means to me. I believe I draw strength in life principally from two aspects of love, my love for my family, especially for my wife, Pat; and my love for the beauty, and the wonder, of our world.

And so, when I say stay with me beauty, It means as I grow older, as my faculties fade, that I will continue to be supported by my love for the beauty of the universe, for my love of beauty in all its manifestations. And they are many.

But what is beauty?

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I dislike shaving. I’ve learned to do it first thing in the morning (most of the time), because it is doubly difficult to go back and do it later in the day. I also do the following: I soften my beard by washing thoroughly with soap, then covering my beard for 15 or 20 seconds with a wet wash rag as hot as I can comfortably stand it.. After rinsing off the soap, I touch my fingers to the soap and apply a second very thin coat of soap to my beard. Quickly, to keep my beard warm and moist, I cover it with a thin layer of shaving cream. I bring the safety razor, Gillett’s Good News or equivalent, across the beard at an angle just as Remsburg, a University of Virginia student, showed me when I was in college. I bring the razor across, not at a right angle to the direction of movement, but at something like a 60 to 70 degree angle for a more efficient cutting surface. It sounds dangerous but I have never cut myself by so doing. Finally I rinse my face in as cold water as I can get from the faucet, and in winter I apply Aqua Velva or some other aftershave lotion to protect my skin. I have learned that in summer an aftershave lotion attracts gnats. I will use a razor for two months or more. I find that by taking the time to soften my beard makes it far easier to get a good clean shave with comfort.

(Prepared for delivery before the Harrisonburg
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
29 March 1992)
By James J. Geary

When Beryl Lawson called me at the end of January and asked if I would put on a program March 22, and I agreed, she then asked me for a title, I was about to leave on an extended trip out-of-state, so off the top of my head I said "The Philosophy of a Lifetime." I leave to you if it is an appropriate title.

I suppose it is rather trite to say these are troublous times we are living in. I think we all realize there is widespread doubt about the traditionally accepted verities. Many of us -feel we are in a time of political, moral, intellectual - and I might even say - spiritual crisis. In addition to the historic problems that have beset complex civilizations, our society has to deal with many new and difficult ethical questions - ethical questions that the rapidly accelerating world of science has tossed at our doors. To say the least, we are confused.

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I remember a late winter afternoon when I experienced a strange sense of being lost that I had not experienced before, nor have I since. I was seventeen, it was during my high school year in Pittsburgh, and I was visiting with my aunt, Katherine Waddell, her husband, Herb, and their two young daughters, Ruth and Dolores. Herb, a shipper at a Pittsburgh furniture warehouse, had visions of being a prosperous chicken farmer. So he had bought this small country place near Prospect, PA, some fifty miles north of Pittsburgh, where he raised something like fifty or a hundred white chickens. He spent the weekends and Wednesday night there, and stayed in Pittsburgh the other nights.

On several occasions I met him at his warehouse Friday night and drove up to Prospect with him for a weekend. We would drive back to Pittsburgh early Monday morning. On this particular weekend the ground was covered with several inches of snow. On Sunday afternoon I decided to take a hike through the fields and woods of that hilly countryside. Their big collie dog accompanied me.

I am sure I must have enjoyed walking through those unfamiliar woods. But it was an overcast day, it was late afternoon, and I was suddenly aware the light was fading. Also I had unaccountably lost my companion. I stepped up my pace through that particular patch of woods. It was getting dark in the woods, but I expected to come out at the top of a hill and look down on Herb and Katherine’s place and the warm and welcoming sight of lighted windows. Instead, as I emerged from the woods I beheld a broad scene utterly strange to me. I recognized nothing. There was the eerie, unreal light of dusk when the ground is covered with snow and the sky is shrouded in a thick overcast. Two or three houses in the distance had lighted windows; the only relief from the encompassing grayness. Night was falling fast. I felt utterly lost. I wondered if I would have to make my way to one of those houses and ask the way. But would they know the Waddells, recent newcomers to the area?

I chose to walk to a hill on my right. When I reached the top, I could look down and see Herb and Katherine’s cozy little house with its warm and welcoming light from the windows. Why I had that panicky feeling I don’t know. I was never really lost, of course. Even if I had to ask at a stranger’s house, I would certainly be back with my uncle and aunt that evening. But the feeling was so intense and tenacious that to this day it comes back to me when I am in the country amid woods and fields, there is snow on the ground, and the overcast sky gives the dusk a darkness and pervading grayness. It takes me back to that lonely moment on a winter twilight at the top of a strange hill.