Jims Writings

Good morning

Guess what! I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a very old man. And lately I’ve been feeling my age.

I read that the Czech novelist, Franz Kafka, wrote that the meaning of life is that it ends. Well, as I near that end, I’ve been looking back at the various periods of my life. The period of my grade school years, is one I wish I had the power of memory and of words to describe to you. It was a time you can’t imagine, it was so primitive compared with the world of the late 20th and the 21st centuries.

I entered the first grade in 1920. The school was in an ancient two-story brick building. The principal’s office was off a landing half way to the second floor. It was a terrifying place with a frightening smell of iodine, or linament, or something that signaled it was a place for scrapes and cuts, of stuff that burned, and bandages by that formidable old maid.

Read the rest of Fate and Finis at the HUU Community Cafe. The talk was given at the HUU Fellowship on December 7, 2008

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.

Patrick Henry protested the lack of gubernatorial power. A Governor, he said, “would be a mere phantom, unable to defend his office from usurpation of the legislature. . . and he would be a dependent instead of a coordinate branch of government.”

We were still at war with Great Britain, so Patrick Henry was given the direction of the militia, but that was about all. To take decisive action, he was required to seek the advice of a Council of State, also appointed by the legislature.

The framers of the Constitution were fearful of strong executives and tyrannical power. They’d had enough of that under the absolutism of the Colonial governors.

Since the Revolution, there have been seven constitutional conventions, in 1776, 1829-30, 1850-51, 1861, 1864, 1867-68, and in 1901-02, the last of the full conventions. There have been two limited conventions, in 1945 and 1956. I covered that latter one for the AP. And there have been two Constitutional revisions, in 1928 and 1971. Since 1971 there have been some piecemeal changes to the Constitution.

The second constitutional convention, in 1830, did only a little to strengthen the powers of the governor. The Council of State, now consisting of three members appointed by the General Assembly, was reduced to an advisory role. But the Governor was still appointed by the legislature.

Some delegates did seek to empower the governor by making the office elective by the people. Delegate Doddridge said : “What is the executive of Virginia? It is nothing more or less than an emanation of the legislative power. He is appointed every year and is responsible only to those to whom his is looking for reappointment. He is a creature of the legislature and not of the people.”
The Constitution of 1850 did made significant strides in empowering the Governor. It got rid of the Council of State, and the governor became elective by the people. His term was increased from three to four years. He was, however, still ineligible to succeed himself, as he is to this day.

The legislature appointed the first 41 governors. Since 1852, the people have elected forty-two governors.

It was not until1870, that the Constitution, for the first time, granted veto power to the Governor over bills passed by the legislature. It took a two-thirds vote of each house to override.

Thirty-two years later, under the so-called Underwood Constitution of 1902, the legislative powers of the Governor were further increased in that he was granted the power to veto certain items in the appropriation bills, the so-call “item veto.” He could also suggest amendments to bills. Then the Budget Act of 1918 authorized and required the Governor to prepare and submit to the General Assembly a biennial budget.

“Thus it will be seen,” wrote Dr. George W. Spicer of the University of Virginia, “that the development of a century and a half in the office of the Governor of Virginia carried him to a position of legislative leadership and administrative impotence.” Spicer pointed out that the Governor was unable to exert any effective control even over those officers appointed by him.

But that was about to change. Nine years later, in 1926, the Virginia electorate chose for Governor a young man with, as Newton put it, “a clear vision of procedure “ and “an unquestioned political leadership.”

In his campaign for Governor, Harry F. Byrd spoke only in general terms, like the need for greater economy and efficiency in government. The people were little prepared for the revolutionary changes that Byrd proposed to the General Assembly. That body was in thorough accord with those changes, and speedily passed the necessary legislation. “The young Governor,” Virginius Dabney writes in his Virginia, the New Dominion, “convinced them that his ‘program of progress’ was essential to their political survival. And that, according to Dabney, was because the Democratic organization was in danger of losing its hold on the state because of Virginia backwardness.

Byrd was responsible for the first revision commission, a commission to suggest amendments to the constitution. There was debate about the propriety of revising the constitution in that manner, but the proposal went forward and was upheld by future court decisions.

The Assembly adopted a joint resolution proposing the short ballot amendments to the Constitution under which only the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General could be elected by direct vote of the people. Before the short ballot, the state treasurer, the superintendent of public instruction, and the commissioner of agriculture and immigration, were elected by the people. Many Virginians opposed the short ballot proposal. They held that such a curtailment of elective officers was against the principles of democratic government.

Governor Byrd explained that under the current arrangement “the Governor cannot be as much of an executive as he should be. Public opinion holds him responsible for efficiency in administration, but actually he has very limited power to control and direct administrative functions. Therefore, he said, “if Virginia is to operate with the efficiency approaching a great business corporation, we must concentrate responsibility.”

The General Assembly also created a commission made up of eminent legal authorities. Under authority of that commission, the Governor employed the New York Bureau of Municipal Research to propose a plan of reorganization. A citizens committee then looked at the recommendations and revised them to fit the conditions in Virginia.

Governor Byrd called the General Assembly to special session March 10, 1927. By action of the legislature, more than 30 minor and useless administrative agencies were abolished, and the remaining agencies consolidated into 12 administrative departments and four agencies in the Governor’s office.

The legislature, by joint resolutions, set in motion the machinery for amendments to the Constitution that established the short ballot and greatly increased the Governor’s administrative authority. It adopted them again at the regular session in 1928. In a June, 1928, election, the people approved the amendments. But it’s interesting to note, that it squeaked by only because of majorities in the Shenandoah Valley and Southwest Virginia.

“Mr. Byrd,” Newman states, “was the first Governor of Virginia , almost wholly by reason of his unquestioned political leadership, who enjoyed the exercise of those administrative powers that properly should belong to the responsible head of a state. Administrative order had come out of chaos.”

Newman points out that at the time Byrd took office, ninety-five separate agencies were responsible for the administration of the affairs of Virginia. Twenty-seven of those were authorized by the Constitution, and 68 had been created by acts of the General Assembly. Financial matters were in the hands of 16 uncoordinated agencies.

Despite these improvements during the Byrd administration, some weaknesses remained.. “Departments,” Newman writes, “ lacked administrative heads with authority to consolidate them properly and channel their energies.” Over the years since then many of these short-comings have been corrected.

One of the Constitutional questions that has been debated time and again is whether Virginia should stay with the prohibition of a governor serving consecutive terms. Virginia is now the only state in the Union to retain the one-term limit. In recent years several governors have voiced their support for reconsidering the rule, including A. Linwood Holton Jr., Gerald Baliles, L Douglas Wilder, James S. Gilmore III, and Mark Warner. Warner’s Commission on Efficiency and Effectiveness supported a change. It said a “good case can be made that long-term planning and accountability would be enhanced” by “giving the public the right to decide whether it wishes to have the power to re-elect a Governor for consecutive terms.”

Non-consecutive terms are permitted. Mills E. Godwin was Governor as a Democrat from 1966 to 1970, and as a Republican from 1974 to 1978. Incidentally when Godwin ran the first time, I wrote several speeches for him, including his first campaign speech, which, by tradition, he delivered in Alexandria. He invited me to ride with him and Governor Albertis Harrison in the Governor’s big black, seven-passenger limousine. Well, even though I was still a state department head, that was quite a heady experience.

Over two centuries, until the Convention of 1971, the Governor’s powers vis-a-vis the legislature, have increased. In recent years, however, it has been a mixed bag, with the legislature gaining additional power to override the Governor’s veto, especially through the holding of reconvened sessions, as we saw this year.

But the Governor also saw his power increased with the creation in the early 1970s of the Governor’s cabinet, and with changes that gave the Governor sole power to remove heads of administrative or executive departments.

Over a span of some 230 years, the powers of the Governor have increased from being virtually a figurehead to the powerful executive he is today. The Governor remains very much the business manager of the affairs of the Commonwealth.

A talk delivered by James J. Geary
Before the Harrisonburg chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution,
October 14, 2006

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.

I think I wanted to be a journalist even in my teens. When I was in high school I had to pull every string I could to take typing, because typing was reserved for commercial students planning to be stenographers or bookkeepers. But I got it.

I began my reporting career in November 1938. I think that was several months before Walter Cronkite began his. He went a bit farther in the news business than I did..

I went to work for the Roanoke World-News, the afternoon paper of the Times-World Corporation. The salary was $15 a week plus a bus pass. I was given a great beat for a cub reporter. It was a year in a little bureau the paper maintained in Salem, the county seat of Roanoke County. That was the reason for the bus pass. It was a small single office across the street from the Roanoke County Court House. That was convenient. I spent a lot of time in that court house.

First, though, I spent a couple of months in the Roanoke office learning the ropes. On my first assignment, the city editor sent me to cover a talk on the evils of alcohol. I had never taken a journalism class. But I had read that a good lead was comprised of the five Ws, who, what, when, where, and why. My lead to that story was something to behold. I still have the clipping. I’ll read it to you. – - – There are 62 words in that sentence. Unaccountably, the city editor ran it just as I wrote it, and he gave me a byline. I guess he wanted to encourage me. But there was another grave error in that paragraph. It has the paper saying the speaker was distinguished. That was a no-no for our managing editor. One time I used honorable before someone’s name. He almost had a fit.

Well, early in 1939 I was sent to Salem, and the reporter I was relieving spent a week breaking me in. Then I was on my own. I covered everything: three courts,, the country board of supervisors, the school board, the five county constitutional officers — the Commonwealth’s attorney, the clerk of court, the commissioner of revenue, the treasurer, the sheriff. Also the town council, the mayor, the residency and district highway department offices,, the chamber of commerce, Roanoke college, the Red Cross, Kiwanis Club speakers, anything and everything.

I had one great source. There was a controversy between the county school board and the board of supervisors. The chairman of the school board, Moss Plunkett, dominated the school board. He later ran for governor against the senior Senator Harry F. Byrd. Plunkett wanted to build a proposed highschool on an ideal location north of Salem. The town and the board of supervisors wanted to build it in town..

The Roanoke newspapers supported Plunkett editorially, so I could always get a story from him. He was a walking encyclopedia on school statistics. But, of course in the end,, the board of supervisors, which controlled the purse strings, got its way. – - – While in Salem, I think I helped my standing with the paper by writing some features for the Sunday Times. Although I worked for the afternoon paper, I was obligated to rewrite stories for the morning paper and to write something special for the Sunday Times. My mother, who had been a reporter and free-lance writer, encouraged me to make a special effort to write well-researched and interesting features. She thought it important that I demonstrate I was willing to do more than required.

I wrote a number of features and they were well played, with illustrations. My salary soon went up from $15 a week to $22 a week.

All in all, my year in Salem was a wonderful introduction to reporting, a splendid training ground for gaining a wide experience.

And then, soon after I was transferred back into the newsroom in Roanoke, I was given another break. The paper went from a salaried six-day 44-hour week to a five-day 40-hour week for reporters. Since we published six days, that meant that some reporter was off each day of the week. I was made the swing man, with a different beat each day, so that I once again covered almost everything. I think by the end of my second year, I was a very good reporter with an all-around experience. Of course you always keep learning.

Incidentally, while I was in Salem I learned a valuable but costly lesson. In re-writing for the morning paper a court story in which a woman had appealed a conviction for reckless driving, I wrote she was convicted on drunk driving. I knew better than that; I had written the original stories on the case. It was just carelessness. For the paper it was expensive carelessness. I never knew how much they paid to settle her suit for damages. I wasn’t fired, but I think it was a narrow escape. I’m sure Mr. Fitzgerald has emphasized that you should check, and double check.

I had been on the paper more than three and one-half years, when I received a commission in the Navy in the summer of 1942. After almost four years in the Navy I came back to the paper. By then I had a wife and two children, and I became very dissatisfied with the salary the paper was paying me, only four dollars a week more than when I went away..

I took a job in public relations with the Veterans Administration in Richmond. It turned out to be a great career move, but not with the VA. After I had been in the job less than a year, Congress slashed the money for VA public relations and I found myself facing the prospect of being laid off. But I wanted out of the VA, anyway.

So I went to a friend of mine from the Roanoke Times who was Governor Tuck’s press secretary to ask if he knew of any newspaper job openings. It just happened that he was resigning from the governor’s office, and the man taking his place was leaving the Associated Press Richmond Bureau. I applied for the AP position and got it.

I had only been on the job a few days when my new boss, Frank Fullerm sent me here to Harrisonburg to report on a terrible tragedy, an explosion that collapsed a building housing a beauty parlor. It was where aa bank is now, right across from Asbury Methodist church.. Eleven women were killed. That night I had a story under my byline that went to papers all over the country.

Actually, because I was new to how the AP worked, I messed up. Wire services then, as I suppose now, were very competitive and speed was important. I tried to cover the story as I would for a paper, going to the funeral home to get the names of the victims, checking out the site, checking with the police, and so forth. I should have stayed mainly at the Daily News-Record office and put together my story from the information being gathered by several local reporters. So I was late with my story. I always felt my boss should have given me better instructions. Well, you live and learn.

I soon became aware that most of the work in the Richmond Bureau of the AP was unexciting rewrites and editing of stories sent in by member newspapers and various stringers throughout the state. Our job was to tighten and improve the writing, if necessary, and send the stories on to the member newspapers and radio stations throughout Virginia.. If the stories were deemed important or newsworthy enough, we would forward them on the national or the regional wires.

The stress in the AP office was greater than that at a newspaper, because at a newspaper once the deadline is passed you can relax.We had no time to relax. You no sooner wrapped up the work for the a.m. cycle than you had to turn around and do it for the p.m. cycle. And we usually had more work than we could do.

For several years at the AP I worked all of those routine jobs, writing for the radio wire, taking news and sports stories over the telephone from stringers, working as day editor, and as night editor. Later, I was given a chance to write some features, and that was more interesting. And then in 1952 I was assigned to write profiles of the two candidates for governor, the Democrat Thomas Stanley, the choice of the Byrd Machine, and the Republican Ted Dalton, a charismatic State senator from Radford. Reporters were charmed by Dalton, and they had a dim view of Stanley.

I drove to Stanleytown, near Martinsville, and spent the day with Stanley and his gracious wife. The next day I spent with Dalton in Radford. I wrote separate stories for each, and the Virginia Press Association awarded me first prize for wire service stories. With the power of the Byrd machine behind him, Stanley won the governorship.

When the General Assembly was in session, four of us, including the bureau chief, would cover it. I was assigned the Senate, At the next session after my two profiles, I mentioned to Senator Dalton that I had won the award. After the assembly finished its work, he gave a steak dinner for members of the Capitol press corps and their wives in my honor.

The AP bureau had one real reporting job. We depended on the Richmond newspapers for local news, but our boss thought we should have a reporter on Capitol Hill. That meant covering the governor, the various state agencies, the State Supreme Court, and the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. It’s was a choice assignment, and I was given it about that time. Covering the governor’s office was the best part, along with politics, which went with the territory.

When the State Supreme Court had opinion day, I, along with the Times-Dispatch political reporter, would try to figure out what the sometimes lengthy opinions really said. There was no one to help you, no résumé. And of course you couldn’t spend all day.

When important segregation cases came to the Federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, the court was part of my beat. I used to see Thurgood Marshall, the prominent African-American lawyer who eventually became a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. But there was another African-American lawyer involved who, I thought, was the most brilliant lawyer in town, white or black.. He was a Richmond lawyer named Spotswood Robinson III. Eventually, he was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

When in 1957, the National Governor’s Conference was held in Williamsburg. I was sent to cover it, along with Harry Nash, who was the one-man Norfolk bureau, and Jack Bell whose beat was the U.S. Senate. Jack Bell was our boss.

When President Eisenhower came to address the governors at a banquet in the Williamsburg cafeteria, Marvin Arrowsmith, the AP reporter who traveled with the president, joined our group. During Eisenhower’s speech, I was given a less than glamorous job. I had to hold on to one of the two telephones in the building for Arrowsmith in case Ike departed from his written text.

Bell took a liking to me and let me write the main national story the last night while he went to have dinner at the Williamsburg Inn with a daughter of Chief Justice Warren and a couple of other people. I joined them later. On a trip to Washington, I made an appointment with Jack and he took me down on the Senate floor before the session began while he interviewed Lyndon Johnson, then the majority leader in the Senate.

By 1958 I was getting restless. I was 44 years old and I felt I had gone as far as I was going to go with the AP. The boss had refused to okay my transfer to Washington, the Mecca for newspersons. And then opportunity struck.

The General Assembly had created the Virginia Civil War Commission, charged with a state observance of the five-year Civil War Centennial, beginning in 1961. That allowed for more than two years preparation. I was assigned to cover the organization meeting of the commission. I duly reported their actions and went on my way.

That afternoon, returning to my office, I bumped into State Senator Curry Carter from Staunton, who was a member of the commission. I stopped to chat with him and I observed that the commission had decided to hire an executive director. Off the top of my head, I said: “I don’t guess I’d be qualified for that job,” and he replied: “Well I don’t see why not.” Nothing more was said. I went on vacation for two weeks in Roanoke and forgot about it.

On returning to Richmond, I was hailed by a lawyer in the State government, who said the selection committee of the commission been looking for me. It turned out I was one of 12 applicants for the position of executive director. I got the job, and thus ended my newspaper career.

During my years with the AP I was associated with other newsmen covering the hill. Three who made it big time were Paul Duke, Roger Mudd, and James Kilpatrick. You may not be familiar with those names. Paul Duke was in the AP office with me. He went on to several national reporting jobs, and finally was moderator on the public radio program, Washington Week in Review for twenty years. Jack Kilpatrick went from political reporter for the Richmond News-Leader to editor of the paper, and then became a very conservative syndicated columnist. Roger Mudd at one time was supposed to share the NBC Nightly News anchor job with Tom Brokaw, but Tom beat him out. I think Roger still has an occasional feature on public television.

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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