By Chinta Strausberg
Board President Todd H. Stroger Saturday unveiled his inaugural Cook County Night Basketball League (CCNBL) game which included playing in a basketball game with former NBA superstars during the kick off his holistic anti-violence plan. Stroger's plan offers not just sports but it provides free adult education, County health care services, job training, life skill courses and counseling for troubled youths.
Joined by former Chicago Bulls superstar Bob “Butterbean” Love at a press conference held at Malcolm X College, 1900 West Van Buren, Stroger said: “Today, we're showing that all of us want to be productive citizens in choosing positive alternatives and not choosing violence.
“In these troubled economic times, violent behavior seems to permeate our communities not just here in Cook County but throughout the entire country,” Stroger said.
“We're also living in a changing economic time…unprecedented in modern time.” Stroger said that is why the government needs to play a “larger role in ensuring the safety of people everywhere.
Dr. Earl B. King, deputy director of the President's Office of Employment and Training (P.O.E.T.), explained that the program targets youths between the ages of 17 and 30 who either don't have an education or those who have failed. The goal is to help them obtain their GED and a four-year college degree.
“The City Colleges of Chicago has partnered” with this Peace Fest initiative which was launched last year by President Stroger. According to King, there will be 14 teams participating in the CCNBL.
King made it clear that: “basketball is just one component of this operation because if they do not go to class, they will not be able to compete in the CCNBL….”
King explained that Emily Love, the wife of Bob Love, along with Dennis Holmes, the executive director of CCNBL, will be tracking the student's grades and their attendance. Mr. Love told the students “We want you to think education first, sports second.” He warned them to put a greater emphasis on the points per game (PPG) but rather on their SAT score.
Harold Noonie Ward, author and former gang leaders, is a living testimony of how students can turned their lives around. “Life ain't nothing but choices. What ever you do make the right choices. I made two bad choices, but God gave me a chance” to turn his life around. He urged them to transformed their minds and take advantage of President Stroger's 'second chance” program.
A West Side housing developer, Pastor M.G. Hunter, New Jerusalem 133rd Psalms MBC, who is the 16th of 21 children, told the students: "I've lived in this city for 42-years, and I don't have a police record. I don't know how it feels to have handcuffs on me.... I made a different choice...." "In our community, it is not incarceration. It's education...." He told them God helped him and can help them, too.
Joining President Stroger were: Love, the Director of Community Affairs for the Bulls and Commissioner of the CCNBL, his wife, Emily, director of Education for CCNBL, Gloster Richardson, former NFL Superbowl champion who is the Dean of Students for the CCNBL, retired Judge Ray Figueroa, Dan Cantrell District Director for U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-7th), Darlene and Howard Sandifer, administrator and executive director of the Chicago West Community Music Center, Ramonski Luv of V-103, Dennis Holmes, the executive director of CCNBL, Darryll King with the “Bling Bling” from Soul 106.3 FM, and 102 FM, who is the spokesperson for CCNBL, Marcus Austin, co-chair of the CCNBL, former NBA players and CCNBL Ambassadors Mickey Johnson and Andre Wakefield; and dozens of astudent pplicants.
PRESS RELEASE:
COOK COUNTY NIGHT BASKETBALL LEAGUE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
MEDIA CONTACT: Dr. Earl B. King, mobile (708) 257-2885,
e-mail: ebking@cookcountygov.com
Press Conference/CCNBL Draft and Registration/ Celebrity Kick-Off
Basketball Game 4 P.M., Saturday, June 6, 2009, Malcolm X College, 1900 West Van Buren, Chicago, IL Game time is from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Stroger Presents the Cook County Night Basketball League (CCNBL) which
will offer free continuing adult education, health care, and job
training programs.
Chicago, IL - County Board President Todd H. Stroger will kick-off his
second annual summer Peace Fest initiative by hosting the first
Inaugural season of the Cook County Night Basketball League beginning at
4 P.M., Saturday, June 6, 2009, at Malcolm X College, 1900 West Van Buren,
offered as an educational, productive and positive alternative to violence.
To address the idleness that often times lead to violence, President
Stroger's CCNBL is taking a holistic approach to reducing violence.
Besides offering sports to youth, the CCNBL will also provide free
continuing adult education courses, health care counseling, life
skills/job training and other corresponding Cook County services to
residents of undeserved communities.
“As the economy struggles to rebound, the lack of quality educational
programs and failing schools are on the rise causing violent behavior to
increase especially in marginalized communities that suffer the
Socioeconomic effects of these realities,” said President Stroger.
“I believe in participating with initiatives such as the Cook County
Night Basketball League because we can provide critical resources and
give support to those communities which have been overlooked in the
past," Stroger stated. "I am very proud of the former NBA superstars
like former Chicago Bulls superstar Bob "Butterbean" Love, the Director
of Community Affairs for the
Bulls, who like others on our team continue to give back to the
community." Love is Commissioner of the CCNBL.
Joining President Stroger will be elected officials, ministers,
educators, and athletes, who will be contributing valuable resources and
time to support the educational, health, and life development components
of League.
Also present will be supporters and cosponsors of this event including:
City College of Chicago Presidents and educational administrators, Mr.
Ron Huberman, Chief Executive Officer of the Chicago Public Schools, and
the CCNBL staff.
Participating in the CCNBL Celebrity Basketbal l Game will be former NBA
Basketball stars/CCNBL Ambassadors including: Mickey Johnson, Rickey
Green, Sonny Parker, Andre Wakefield, and Earl King. There will also be
additional celebrities such as Ramonski Luv from V103 and a special
appearance from Darryll King with the “Bling, Bling," spokesperson for
the CCNBL, from Soul
106.3. The two celebrity coaches of both teams will be Mr. Bob “Butter
Bean” Love and Mr. Gloster Richardson, former NFL star.
The CCNBL will continue until Saturday, August 20, 2009. The games will
be played in various community colleges throughout Cook County.
-30-
Monday, June 8, 2009
WE DEMAND PEACE IN THE STREETS
Dear Readers:
I have not seen this kind of coalition since the election of Mayor Harold Washington and to some extent the presidential campaign of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.
My hope is that this peace movement will expand even more and that men in particular unite in taking back our streets from heartless youth who obviously do not value life, but my gut tells me once again, this battle will be led and won by our children--just like in Birmingham, Alabama.
Chinta Strausberg
Pfleger: “We Demand Peace”
'Time to take back the streets'
By Chinta Strausberg
Close to 600 people attended a “We Demand Peace” rally held on Saturday, June 6, 2009, at the Daley Plaza where a coalition of younger and older generation, Christians and Muslims united in calling for an end to the violence that is paralyzing black and brown communities.
Fed up with seeing our streets draped in yellow and black “Police Line Do Not Cross” crime tape, Saint Sabina's Father Michael L. Pfleger took his anti-violence movement to the streets. He reached out to Tom Joyner, 92.3's Tre (The Chocolate Jock), WGCI's Tony Sculfield and other radio personalities who have pledged to promote peace rather than violence.
“This is not a rally,” bellowed Pfleger challenging the multi-racial crowd to “demand peace.” Working the crowd into a frenzy, supporters pierced the air with their signs that said: “It's time to take back our streets,” and “With gun violence, everybody is a victim.”
“We're demanding peace starting with you, in your house, on your block, on your neighborhood. We're demanding peace from the White House to my house...” he stated. “It's time to take back our streets.”
Distraught over the killings of our children, Pfleger has formed a coalition not seen since the election of the late Mayor Harold Washington. In an effort to reconnect with all factions of the community, Pastor has been meeting with street leaders, Muslims, Christians of all faiths, rappers, elected officials, the young and older generations.
Ronnie Mosley, a senior at Simeon High School, said: “We, the youth, must take action.” Quoting Mississippi civil rights worker Ed King who said: “when nobody else is moving and the youth is moving, there is a leadership for everybody.”
Flipping a page in history, he reminded the crowd how it was the youth in Birmingham who captured national attention on how white racists were beating and mistreating blacks in the South. “That's what set the stage for Dr. King and the march on Washington,” Mosley said. “We can check ourselves, our own kids…. The true solution is the youth revolution and that is what we need now,” Mosley said challenging supporters to demand peace.
Agreeing was U.S. Senator Roland W. Burris who said: “We have to stop the violence…. No more guns in our community…. When I grew up, we had fights…disagreements, but we used our fists to settle them and then we'd get up and walk and go home, but now, you settle them and never know you don't get up when one of those Tech 9's bullets hit you in the head.”
Minister Louis Farrakhan and Minister Ishmael Muhammad gave their wholehearted support for the "We Demand Peace" movement. At the rally, Minister Ishmael Muhammad said: “If we're going to bring peace in our community, then as a man thinketh in his heart so is he, and if a man hates his brother, then he is a murderer of his brother.
“So, if we are blood of each other's blood, bone of each other's bone, flesh of each other's flesh, then our young people have to know who they are and who they are by nature to relationship to the creator,” Muhammad said.
“They are not dogs,” he said. “Be yea transformed by the renewal of your mind and when the mind is made new and a new heart is put in us and the old heart of stone is taken out and a heart of flesh is put into us and we live by the two greatest commandants which all of the laws and prophets hang on and that is for us to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength…and love thy neighbor as you should love yourself.”
But it was 19-year-old Johnetta Anderson, professionally known as Awthentik a freshman at Columbia College, who mesmerized the crowd.
Representing the Hip-Hop Detoxx culture and Spoken Word artists, Anderson said: “We see kids dying and hear gun shots and we see the police cars and the ambulance every day, and when we turn our radios on, we got to hear the same thing that we already see…so it's like there is no escape.
“If all we see…and hear (is) negativity, how can they expect positive acts from us if that is all we are seeing and hearing”? Anderson warned youth they must learn how to distinguish between reality and entertainment.
Talking to Generation X, Anderson said: “They say I'm African American but ya'll I ain't never been to Africa. They got these kids looking up to pimps; prostitutes and thugs playing follow their leader.
“They call me an American, but I can see the way America does people and poverty, I cannot relate either. See, they snatched us from our Motherland. Turning us into…orphans, making us unable to stand,” she said.
Anderson said blacks don't know their history especially young boys and have slave mentalities. “We're a lost generation and understands nothing to the fullest and it's sad because the only thing that gets into these kids heads today is bullets.
“They talk about the American dream, but how can we dream when our dream got nightmares…. How can we dream when we can't even sleep….”
Anderson said all too often she's snubbed because she is from the West Side, a single parent household and told how “crack heads come up to me because I'm 19 asking if I sell blow. No, I sell dreams…. I'm OK from being from the dirty West Side because dirt is the only way a rose can grow,” she told a cheering crowd.
Anderson painted a grim picture of Generation X especially “the value of a woman lies in her full hips and a man is not a man unless he's done popped a full clip. Gangbangers do things so a lot of fingers get twisted up. Guns make you a man so a lot of body bags police are zipping up.
“It's a risk just to go to school so a lot of classes are getting cut, and we cannot move forward because this generation is stuck,” she warned. “The child is X because somehow souls have no moms and dads, and we ain't living Dr. King's dream because we're living with what Willie Lynch had.”
Anderson added: “All I can do is pray and ask God to forgive this generation who lacks good sense and respect. The generation without a conscious formerly known as the Generation X.”
Others who spoke were: Harold Davis, activist Kublai Toure, anti-gun activist Mark Walsh, former gangbanger Wallace “Gator” Bradley; Simeon High School student Ronnie Mosley; Phil Jackson from Black Star; Ald. Latasha Thomas (17th), Senator Jacqueline Collins (D-16th); Brother Jeffrey Muhammad and Sister Khaleelah Muhammad. Rev. Wilfredo DeJesus gave the invocation.
Referring to the shooting death of DuSable Leadership Academy senior Lorenzo McKeithen who was killed the day before the Loop rally, Davis chided the horde of reporters camped outside of the school. “If there hadn't been a shooting, would you have been here”?
Davis said what reporters didn't see and report was what was going on inside of the school. “The valedictorian was a black male. The salutatorian was a black male; the Bill Gates recipient was a black male, 12-year attendance was a black male. They didn't report that...,” he said.
Sculfield echoed a similar plea. “Every time a kid dies, it's got to be everybody's kid who dies…. We can no longer afford to let our kids die in the street and close our door and say 'hey, that's not my kid.'” Sculfield added: 'We've got to get the village back.”
Tre, “The Chocolate Jock,” said: “This is the summer to be a parent to your child.” He urged parents to monitor the curfew rules. He also urged men to become surrogate fathers to those boys who are fatherless. That was the norm when he was a boy.
On gun violence and the escalation of shootings, Walsh make it clear: “Here in Illinois, about 1,000 people a year die from gun violence. For every one person killed, two more survived. Injured costs, medical costs, we have to absorb. If a woman lives in a home that has a gun, she is seven times more likely to be shot by a spouse, relative, or a child.”
Calling for commonsense legislation to get guns off the streets, Walsh said: “If you want to go hunt…, don't hunt our children….” He urged congress to reinstate the assault weapons ban on the federal level. He also called for instant background checks.
Toure said “we need to break bread' with gang leaders and bring back peace to our streets. “I'm tired of professional lip service,” he said explaining the only ones who can achieve peace are those in the streets.
Bradley, a former gang enforcer, has turned his life around. “I am putting out an appeal for all you young brothers who are creating all of these block cliques…. “ He wants the state to give permission for leaders to talk to incarcerated gangbangers so they can get the word out to stop the killing.
“This ain't no operating no snitch movement,” Bradley said. “This is movement where we will work” with all levels of government and pastors. He urged gangbangers to call street leaders or ministers “so they can make the right choice” and keep their freedom.
Others attending this event were Dr. Carol Adams, Illinois Secretary of the Department of Human Services and retired Judge Ray Figueroa.
I have not seen this kind of coalition since the election of Mayor Harold Washington and to some extent the presidential campaign of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.
My hope is that this peace movement will expand even more and that men in particular unite in taking back our streets from heartless youth who obviously do not value life, but my gut tells me once again, this battle will be led and won by our children--just like in Birmingham, Alabama.
Chinta Strausberg
Pfleger: “We Demand Peace”
'Time to take back the streets'
By Chinta Strausberg
Close to 600 people attended a “We Demand Peace” rally held on Saturday, June 6, 2009, at the Daley Plaza where a coalition of younger and older generation, Christians and Muslims united in calling for an end to the violence that is paralyzing black and brown communities.
Fed up with seeing our streets draped in yellow and black “Police Line Do Not Cross” crime tape, Saint Sabina's Father Michael L. Pfleger took his anti-violence movement to the streets. He reached out to Tom Joyner, 92.3's Tre (The Chocolate Jock), WGCI's Tony Sculfield and other radio personalities who have pledged to promote peace rather than violence.
“This is not a rally,” bellowed Pfleger challenging the multi-racial crowd to “demand peace.” Working the crowd into a frenzy, supporters pierced the air with their signs that said: “It's time to take back our streets,” and “With gun violence, everybody is a victim.”
“We're demanding peace starting with you, in your house, on your block, on your neighborhood. We're demanding peace from the White House to my house...” he stated. “It's time to take back our streets.”
Distraught over the killings of our children, Pfleger has formed a coalition not seen since the election of the late Mayor Harold Washington. In an effort to reconnect with all factions of the community, Pastor has been meeting with street leaders, Muslims, Christians of all faiths, rappers, elected officials, the young and older generations.
Ronnie Mosley, a senior at Simeon High School, said: “We, the youth, must take action.” Quoting Mississippi civil rights worker Ed King who said: “when nobody else is moving and the youth is moving, there is a leadership for everybody.”
Flipping a page in history, he reminded the crowd how it was the youth in Birmingham who captured national attention on how white racists were beating and mistreating blacks in the South. “That's what set the stage for Dr. King and the march on Washington,” Mosley said. “We can check ourselves, our own kids…. The true solution is the youth revolution and that is what we need now,” Mosley said challenging supporters to demand peace.
Agreeing was U.S. Senator Roland W. Burris who said: “We have to stop the violence…. No more guns in our community…. When I grew up, we had fights…disagreements, but we used our fists to settle them and then we'd get up and walk and go home, but now, you settle them and never know you don't get up when one of those Tech 9's bullets hit you in the head.”
Minister Louis Farrakhan and Minister Ishmael Muhammad gave their wholehearted support for the "We Demand Peace" movement. At the rally, Minister Ishmael Muhammad said: “If we're going to bring peace in our community, then as a man thinketh in his heart so is he, and if a man hates his brother, then he is a murderer of his brother.
“So, if we are blood of each other's blood, bone of each other's bone, flesh of each other's flesh, then our young people have to know who they are and who they are by nature to relationship to the creator,” Muhammad said.
“They are not dogs,” he said. “Be yea transformed by the renewal of your mind and when the mind is made new and a new heart is put in us and the old heart of stone is taken out and a heart of flesh is put into us and we live by the two greatest commandants which all of the laws and prophets hang on and that is for us to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength…and love thy neighbor as you should love yourself.”
But it was 19-year-old Johnetta Anderson, professionally known as Awthentik a freshman at Columbia College, who mesmerized the crowd.
Representing the Hip-Hop Detoxx culture and Spoken Word artists, Anderson said: “We see kids dying and hear gun shots and we see the police cars and the ambulance every day, and when we turn our radios on, we got to hear the same thing that we already see…so it's like there is no escape.
“If all we see…and hear (is) negativity, how can they expect positive acts from us if that is all we are seeing and hearing”? Anderson warned youth they must learn how to distinguish between reality and entertainment.
Talking to Generation X, Anderson said: “They say I'm African American but ya'll I ain't never been to Africa. They got these kids looking up to pimps; prostitutes and thugs playing follow their leader.
“They call me an American, but I can see the way America does people and poverty, I cannot relate either. See, they snatched us from our Motherland. Turning us into…orphans, making us unable to stand,” she said.
Anderson said blacks don't know their history especially young boys and have slave mentalities. “We're a lost generation and understands nothing to the fullest and it's sad because the only thing that gets into these kids heads today is bullets.
“They talk about the American dream, but how can we dream when our dream got nightmares…. How can we dream when we can't even sleep….”
Anderson said all too often she's snubbed because she is from the West Side, a single parent household and told how “crack heads come up to me because I'm 19 asking if I sell blow. No, I sell dreams…. I'm OK from being from the dirty West Side because dirt is the only way a rose can grow,” she told a cheering crowd.
Anderson painted a grim picture of Generation X especially “the value of a woman lies in her full hips and a man is not a man unless he's done popped a full clip. Gangbangers do things so a lot of fingers get twisted up. Guns make you a man so a lot of body bags police are zipping up.
“It's a risk just to go to school so a lot of classes are getting cut, and we cannot move forward because this generation is stuck,” she warned. “The child is X because somehow souls have no moms and dads, and we ain't living Dr. King's dream because we're living with what Willie Lynch had.”
Anderson added: “All I can do is pray and ask God to forgive this generation who lacks good sense and respect. The generation without a conscious formerly known as the Generation X.”
Others who spoke were: Harold Davis, activist Kublai Toure, anti-gun activist Mark Walsh, former gangbanger Wallace “Gator” Bradley; Simeon High School student Ronnie Mosley; Phil Jackson from Black Star; Ald. Latasha Thomas (17th), Senator Jacqueline Collins (D-16th); Brother Jeffrey Muhammad and Sister Khaleelah Muhammad. Rev. Wilfredo DeJesus gave the invocation.
Referring to the shooting death of DuSable Leadership Academy senior Lorenzo McKeithen who was killed the day before the Loop rally, Davis chided the horde of reporters camped outside of the school. “If there hadn't been a shooting, would you have been here”?
Davis said what reporters didn't see and report was what was going on inside of the school. “The valedictorian was a black male. The salutatorian was a black male; the Bill Gates recipient was a black male, 12-year attendance was a black male. They didn't report that...,” he said.
Sculfield echoed a similar plea. “Every time a kid dies, it's got to be everybody's kid who dies…. We can no longer afford to let our kids die in the street and close our door and say 'hey, that's not my kid.'” Sculfield added: 'We've got to get the village back.”
Tre, “The Chocolate Jock,” said: “This is the summer to be a parent to your child.” He urged parents to monitor the curfew rules. He also urged men to become surrogate fathers to those boys who are fatherless. That was the norm when he was a boy.
On gun violence and the escalation of shootings, Walsh make it clear: “Here in Illinois, about 1,000 people a year die from gun violence. For every one person killed, two more survived. Injured costs, medical costs, we have to absorb. If a woman lives in a home that has a gun, she is seven times more likely to be shot by a spouse, relative, or a child.”
Calling for commonsense legislation to get guns off the streets, Walsh said: “If you want to go hunt…, don't hunt our children….” He urged congress to reinstate the assault weapons ban on the federal level. He also called for instant background checks.
Toure said “we need to break bread' with gang leaders and bring back peace to our streets. “I'm tired of professional lip service,” he said explaining the only ones who can achieve peace are those in the streets.
Bradley, a former gang enforcer, has turned his life around. “I am putting out an appeal for all you young brothers who are creating all of these block cliques…. “ He wants the state to give permission for leaders to talk to incarcerated gangbangers so they can get the word out to stop the killing.
“This ain't no operating no snitch movement,” Bradley said. “This is movement where we will work” with all levels of government and pastors. He urged gangbangers to call street leaders or ministers “so they can make the right choice” and keep their freedom.
Others attending this event were Dr. Carol Adams, Illinois Secretary of the Department of Human Services and retired Judge Ray Figueroa.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
COOK COUNTY OFFERS SPECIAL RABIES PROGRAM
To view "The Strausberg Report" featuring Cook County Animal & Rabies Administrator Dr. Donna Alexander, click on: www.probationchallenge.org, then go to "ON DEMAND" and click on the show entitled "Dr. Donna Alexander. She revealed a lot about rabied bats and the problems they're causing in urban areas including in your home.
Dr. Alexander reveals she's created a new youth program entitled "It's not Cool to be Cruel" to animals. You heard it first on "The Strausberg Report."
Cook County to Offer Discounted Vaccinations and Micro chipping for Pet Owners
Four month program designed to increase number of pets vaccinated for rabies, help owners reconnect with lost animals
Cook County’s Department of Animal and Rabies Control Wednesday unveiled its schedule for the 2009 series of community clinics held from June through September that will allow pet owners in Cook County to receive discounts on rabies vaccinations and micro chipping for their dogs, cats, and ferrets through the mobile medical units.
“This program is designed to protect the health of peoples’ pets and the public,” said Cook County Board President Todd H. Stroger, whose office oversees the County’s Department of Animal and Rabies Control.
“We are able to ensure that pets, whose owners might not otherwise be able to afford rabies vaccinations, get their shots and that the larger community be assured that one less animal is at risk of transmitting this deadly disease,” Stroger stated.
“We are committed to getting the word out to pet owners about their legal obligations to comply with regulations for important initiatives like rabies control, and that includes making sure your pet’s rabies shots are up-to-date. Compliance goes up when we help people connect with affordable access to services,” said Dr. Donna Alexander, administrator of the Department of Animal & Rabies Control.
The Cook County Animal and Rabies Control summer clinics allow for affordable rabies vaccinations to bring all citizens into compliance with the law while providing an essential public health protection against a deadly disease that has caused public health concerns in four states within the past two years.
Rabies vaccines will cost $7 for a one year and $21 for three years. Ferrets may only be vaccinated for one year and the cost of the vaccine is $9. Pet owners can have their pet’s micro chipped for $10; however, this does not include the national registration fee.
On November 19, 2008, President Stroger and the Cook County Board of Commissioners unanimously passed legislation clarifying the requirement for all dogs, cats, and ferrets being current for rabies vaccinations.
President Stroger praised the County’s micro chipping program saying it is an option that facilitates the reunion of lost pets with their owners “while showing that we’re giving people affordable access to cutting-edge technology that immensely helps in the reunion of lost pets with their owners.”
On November 19, 2008, President Stroger and the Cook County Board of Commissioners unanimously passed legislation clarifying the requirement for all dogs, cats, and ferrets being current for rabies vaccinations.
Cook County’s low cost clinic services will be offered from 10 a.m. until 2:45 p.m. throughout the County from June through September.
The schedule of the community clinics is attached, and it is also posted at local Jewel Food Stores as well as the Cook County’s website which is: www.cookcountygov.com.
-30-
Cook County Department of Animal and rabies Control
Rabies Vaccine and Microchip Clinics
Schedule for June – September 2009
Events will be held from 10 a.m. to 2:45 p.m.
JUNE JULY
Tues. June 2 Wed. July 1
Commissioner Murphy’s Office Jewel
5405 W. 127th Street 6057 S. Western
Crestwood, IL Chicago, IL
Wed. June 3 Tues. July 7
Richton Park Village Hall Jewel
4455 Sauk trail 1860 S. Arlington Htgs. Rd.
Richton Park, IL Arlington Heights, IL
Tues. June 9 Wed. July 8
Harvey Police Dept. Elk Grove Village Hall
15301 Dixie Hwy. 901 Wellington Ave.
Harvey, IL Farmers Market
Elk Grove Village, IL
Wed. June 10 Tues. July 14
Markham Court House Plaza Pet
16501 S. Kedzie Parkway 18415 S. Halsted
Markham, IL Glenwood, IL
Tues. June 16 Wed. July 15
Jackson park Field House Jewel – Dan Ryan
6401 S. Stony Island 101 W. 87th Street
Chicago, IL Chicago, IL
Wed. June 17 Tues. July 21
Sterling Estates Oak Leaf Commons
9300 W. 79th St. 201500 Lee Street
Justice, IL Des Plaines, IL
Tues. June 23 Wed. July 22
Calumet City Police Dept. Jewel
1200 Pulaski 127th & Harlem
Calumet City, IL Palos Heights, IL
Wed. June 24 Tues. July 28
Joy Fellowship Baptist Church Maywood Public Library
2025 E. 175th 121 So. 5th Avenue
Lansing, IL Maywood, IL &n bsp;
Tues. June 30 Wed. July 29
McKinley Field Palos Hills Community Ctr.
2210 W. Pershing Road 8455 W. 103rd St.
(Pershing & Western) Palos Hills, IL
Chicago, IL
Dr. Alexander reveals she's created a new youth program entitled "It's not Cool to be Cruel" to animals. You heard it first on "The Strausberg Report."
Cook County to Offer Discounted Vaccinations and Micro chipping for Pet Owners
Four month program designed to increase number of pets vaccinated for rabies, help owners reconnect with lost animals
Cook County’s Department of Animal and Rabies Control Wednesday unveiled its schedule for the 2009 series of community clinics held from June through September that will allow pet owners in Cook County to receive discounts on rabies vaccinations and micro chipping for their dogs, cats, and ferrets through the mobile medical units.
“This program is designed to protect the health of peoples’ pets and the public,” said Cook County Board President Todd H. Stroger, whose office oversees the County’s Department of Animal and Rabies Control.
“We are able to ensure that pets, whose owners might not otherwise be able to afford rabies vaccinations, get their shots and that the larger community be assured that one less animal is at risk of transmitting this deadly disease,” Stroger stated.
“We are committed to getting the word out to pet owners about their legal obligations to comply with regulations for important initiatives like rabies control, and that includes making sure your pet’s rabies shots are up-to-date. Compliance goes up when we help people connect with affordable access to services,” said Dr. Donna Alexander, administrator of the Department of Animal & Rabies Control.
The Cook County Animal and Rabies Control summer clinics allow for affordable rabies vaccinations to bring all citizens into compliance with the law while providing an essential public health protection against a deadly disease that has caused public health concerns in four states within the past two years.
Rabies vaccines will cost $7 for a one year and $21 for three years. Ferrets may only be vaccinated for one year and the cost of the vaccine is $9. Pet owners can have their pet’s micro chipped for $10; however, this does not include the national registration fee.
On November 19, 2008, President Stroger and the Cook County Board of Commissioners unanimously passed legislation clarifying the requirement for all dogs, cats, and ferrets being current for rabies vaccinations.
President Stroger praised the County’s micro chipping program saying it is an option that facilitates the reunion of lost pets with their owners “while showing that we’re giving people affordable access to cutting-edge technology that immensely helps in the reunion of lost pets with their owners.”
On November 19, 2008, President Stroger and the Cook County Board of Commissioners unanimously passed legislation clarifying the requirement for all dogs, cats, and ferrets being current for rabies vaccinations.
Cook County’s low cost clinic services will be offered from 10 a.m. until 2:45 p.m. throughout the County from June through September.
The schedule of the community clinics is attached, and it is also posted at local Jewel Food Stores as well as the Cook County’s website which is: www.cookcountygov.com.
-30-
Cook County Department of Animal and rabies Control
Rabies Vaccine and Microchip Clinics
Schedule for June – September 2009
Events will be held from 10 a.m. to 2:45 p.m.
JUNE JULY
Tues. June 2 Wed. July 1
Commissioner Murphy’s Office Jewel
5405 W. 127th Street 6057 S. Western
Crestwood, IL Chicago, IL
Wed. June 3 Tues. July 7
Richton Park Village Hall Jewel
4455 Sauk trail 1860 S. Arlington Htgs. Rd.
Richton Park, IL Arlington Heights, IL
Tues. June 9 Wed. July 8
Harvey Police Dept. Elk Grove Village Hall
15301 Dixie Hwy. 901 Wellington Ave.
Harvey, IL Farmers Market
Elk Grove Village, IL
Wed. June 10 Tues. July 14
Markham Court House Plaza Pet
16501 S. Kedzie Parkway 18415 S. Halsted
Markham, IL Glenwood, IL
Tues. June 16 Wed. July 15
Jackson park Field House Jewel – Dan Ryan
6401 S. Stony Island 101 W. 87th Street
Chicago, IL Chicago, IL
Wed. June 17 Tues. July 21
Sterling Estates Oak Leaf Commons
9300 W. 79th St. 201500 Lee Street
Justice, IL Des Plaines, IL
Tues. June 23 Wed. July 22
Calumet City Police Dept. Jewel
1200 Pulaski 127th & Harlem
Calumet City, IL Palos Heights, IL
Wed. June 24 Tues. July 28
Joy Fellowship Baptist Church Maywood Public Library
2025 E. 175th 121 So. 5th Avenue
Lansing, IL Maywood, IL &n bsp;
Tues. June 30 Wed. July 29
McKinley Field Palos Hills Community Ctr.
2210 W. Pershing Road 8455 W. 103rd St.
(Pershing & Western) Palos Hills, IL
Chicago, IL
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
PFLEGER CALLS FOR AMNESTY ON STUDENT LOANS
PFLEGER CALLS FOR AMNESTY ON STUDENT LOANS
By Chinta Strausberg
If under President George W. Bush’s administration, the federal government can approve a whopping $8.5 trillion in bailout funds to rescue failing banks and financial institutions, then Father Michael L. Pfleger Tuesday said it’s time for a federally sponsored amnesty student loan program needed to save and expand our student population.
Bush signed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 that authorizes the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury to payout $700 billion to bail out distressed banks, both domestic and foreign, AIG, Federal Express, and other financial institutions while our students are having their wages garnished for non or late payments.
I hope that President Barack Obama will extend that Act to including bailing out students who are financially strapped due to federal demands to repay their loans at huge amounts and at high interests rates—a double whammy for our children who simply want to become our leaders of tomorrow.
Perturbed by the issuing of taxpayers dollars to bailout the wealthy, who made bad financial choices, Pfleger said the government needs to step up and come to the rescue of students who after taking out loans to get their degrees are being forced to make high payments with equally high interest rates sometimes for more than two decades.
“I believe the federal government should forgive part of the loan,” said Pfleger who heads the Saint Sabina church. “The students should pay some of the loans back, but often times these payments are so big it makes it difficult for students to repay them.
“It also serves as a disincentive to other students who may not go on to college fearing they too will get trapped in the student loan” circle of financial pain that keeps many in a cycle of fiscal anxiety. And, sometimes students simply drop out of college because of the high payments. The student loan pay back formula goes against the grain of the American dream.
That is why Pfleger is calling for an amnesty because many students “simply can’t get caught up” with their payments. “It’s shackling these young people while discouraging others from staying in college.”
Pfleger wants the government to charge the students based on the jobs they currently have. If students are working at a community social or community development organization, their payments should reflect what they actually make.
Pastor Pfleger is absolutely correct. Putting fiscal handcuffs on students serves no good purpose; in fact it flies in the face of helping them graduate because it keeps them in poverty until their high interest loans and payments are paid. The trickle-down effect of this vicious fiscal cycle is that it hurts their families and their communities, which also impacts the national budget.
I personally know of two cases—one involving a young mother of three, who worked three jobs, is a wife; yet she earned her master’s degree in occupational therapy. She owes the federal government $60,000 and is struggling to make ends meet.
Her brother, a father of one, owes the federal government $40,000. He is still looking for a job, but he’s harassed several times a week by collectors demanding a payment of $500 a month towards his student loan. He has stopped answering the phone but hasn’t given up finding a job.
I am hoping that lawmakers and civil rights activists hear the cries of Father Pfleger and others and revise the student loan rules and regulations. Students need an economic bailout too just like Wall Street where CEO’s walk away with golden parachutes worth up to $15 million, $20 million and sometimes more.
Something is very wrong with that picture and caught in the crossfire’s of financial inequity are our students, our leaders for tomorrow.
Take the politics out of the economic stimulus package and put the people first—those like our students who live on Main Street, not Wall Street.
And, for those lawmakers who are allergic to assisting those who are less fortunate and others who forget from whence they come, then expand the Financial Aid’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness Act and come up with a plan that wipes out student loans if they commit to doing volunteer work.
I would oppose programs that give options of joining the military, but offering them teaching positions for a certain number of years would help them to academically grow another generation while freeing them from the onerous loans that are stifling their goals of being successful.
There is precedent for these forgiveness programs such as agreeing to become teachers in certain poverty areas, doctors, military personnel, Peace Corp, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) to name a few. The federal government needs to include all students in this forgiveness program because it benefits not just the students but it expands the nation’s economy too.
It makes financial sense to reform these student loan rules. Why punish our best and brightest while giving away more than $1 trillion in welfare to corporate America? Where is the fairness in that? Where is the justice for struggling students?
Student loans place our leaders of tomorrow in a Catch-22 position—damned if they do go to school, and damned if they don’t. Either way, under the current student loan rules, they graduate but with a federal foot on their necks—blocking their privilege of earning a decent living because of draconian payments that if not maintained also ruin their credit and their future.
Thank God we have a new President, Barack Obama, who is concerned about the least of thee and who has the vision and wisdom to reach back and help those who are not a part of the nations wealthy. I hope you write and/or call President Obama and your lawmakers and make your wishes known. Our nation cannot grow if our children are kept behind an archaic student loan payment system that punishes rather than rewards their achievements.
-30-
By Chinta Strausberg
If under President George W. Bush’s administration, the federal government can approve a whopping $8.5 trillion in bailout funds to rescue failing banks and financial institutions, then Father Michael L. Pfleger Tuesday said it’s time for a federally sponsored amnesty student loan program needed to save and expand our student population.
Bush signed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 that authorizes the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury to payout $700 billion to bail out distressed banks, both domestic and foreign, AIG, Federal Express, and other financial institutions while our students are having their wages garnished for non or late payments.
I hope that President Barack Obama will extend that Act to including bailing out students who are financially strapped due to federal demands to repay their loans at huge amounts and at high interests rates—a double whammy for our children who simply want to become our leaders of tomorrow.
Perturbed by the issuing of taxpayers dollars to bailout the wealthy, who made bad financial choices, Pfleger said the government needs to step up and come to the rescue of students who after taking out loans to get their degrees are being forced to make high payments with equally high interest rates sometimes for more than two decades.
“I believe the federal government should forgive part of the loan,” said Pfleger who heads the Saint Sabina church. “The students should pay some of the loans back, but often times these payments are so big it makes it difficult for students to repay them.
“It also serves as a disincentive to other students who may not go on to college fearing they too will get trapped in the student loan” circle of financial pain that keeps many in a cycle of fiscal anxiety. And, sometimes students simply drop out of college because of the high payments. The student loan pay back formula goes against the grain of the American dream.
That is why Pfleger is calling for an amnesty because many students “simply can’t get caught up” with their payments. “It’s shackling these young people while discouraging others from staying in college.”
Pfleger wants the government to charge the students based on the jobs they currently have. If students are working at a community social or community development organization, their payments should reflect what they actually make.
Pastor Pfleger is absolutely correct. Putting fiscal handcuffs on students serves no good purpose; in fact it flies in the face of helping them graduate because it keeps them in poverty until their high interest loans and payments are paid. The trickle-down effect of this vicious fiscal cycle is that it hurts their families and their communities, which also impacts the national budget.
I personally know of two cases—one involving a young mother of three, who worked three jobs, is a wife; yet she earned her master’s degree in occupational therapy. She owes the federal government $60,000 and is struggling to make ends meet.
Her brother, a father of one, owes the federal government $40,000. He is still looking for a job, but he’s harassed several times a week by collectors demanding a payment of $500 a month towards his student loan. He has stopped answering the phone but hasn’t given up finding a job.
I am hoping that lawmakers and civil rights activists hear the cries of Father Pfleger and others and revise the student loan rules and regulations. Students need an economic bailout too just like Wall Street where CEO’s walk away with golden parachutes worth up to $15 million, $20 million and sometimes more.
Something is very wrong with that picture and caught in the crossfire’s of financial inequity are our students, our leaders for tomorrow.
Take the politics out of the economic stimulus package and put the people first—those like our students who live on Main Street, not Wall Street.
And, for those lawmakers who are allergic to assisting those who are less fortunate and others who forget from whence they come, then expand the Financial Aid’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness Act and come up with a plan that wipes out student loans if they commit to doing volunteer work.
I would oppose programs that give options of joining the military, but offering them teaching positions for a certain number of years would help them to academically grow another generation while freeing them from the onerous loans that are stifling their goals of being successful.
There is precedent for these forgiveness programs such as agreeing to become teachers in certain poverty areas, doctors, military personnel, Peace Corp, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) to name a few. The federal government needs to include all students in this forgiveness program because it benefits not just the students but it expands the nation’s economy too.
It makes financial sense to reform these student loan rules. Why punish our best and brightest while giving away more than $1 trillion in welfare to corporate America? Where is the fairness in that? Where is the justice for struggling students?
Student loans place our leaders of tomorrow in a Catch-22 position—damned if they do go to school, and damned if they don’t. Either way, under the current student loan rules, they graduate but with a federal foot on their necks—blocking their privilege of earning a decent living because of draconian payments that if not maintained also ruin their credit and their future.
Thank God we have a new President, Barack Obama, who is concerned about the least of thee and who has the vision and wisdom to reach back and help those who are not a part of the nations wealthy. I hope you write and/or call President Obama and your lawmakers and make your wishes known. Our nation cannot grow if our children are kept behind an archaic student loan payment system that punishes rather than rewards their achievements.
-30-
Monday, January 19, 2009
OBAMA SET TO BEAR AMERICA's ALBATROSS
Obama set to bear America’s albatross
Call to service key in bearing this load
By Chinta Strausberg
When the clock strikes noon today, Tuesday, January 20, 2009, Vice President Joe Biden will have already been sworn into office, but the nation’s financial, racial divide, healthcare inequities, educational deficits, environmental weaknesses, and foreign relations demise will fall on the shoulders of President Barack Obama.
Obama, who will become the 44th U.S. president and the first African American, will adhere to Article II, Section I of the U.S. Constitution by taking the following oath:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
While I fear the honeymoon with President Obama will be short lived, thank God America will never be the same again. It will truly be the dawning of a new day, a new nation—one where the 1886 Statute of Liberty will take on a new meaning—one where she will not only welcome immigrants, tourists, and those returning home, but people of all races and religions who want to experience the American dream.
Her torch will become symbolic of the hope that more than 62 million Obama supporters wielded in the ballot box on November 4, 2008. It will become the beacon of change and the beginning of an era that will seek to rectify America’s past wrongs and America’s violations of human and civil rights. It will represent an era where equity will be the cornerstone and the litmus test of the Obama presidency.
No more affirmative action for the wealthy. Let fairness ring from all corners of this nation. The light from the Statute of Liberty will expose every single unfair policy, law or practice and it shall be changed.
The light will represent the truth in exposing and finding viable solutions to the financial quagmire President Obama inherited. The light will shine on new ways to fix old problems like stabilizing Social Security, public hospitals, restructuring student loans, rebuilding America’s infrastructure that includes creating millions of jobs—much like the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a public works program President Franklin D. Roosevelt began for young men whose families were unemployed. It was included in Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression.
Well, President Obama, I believe, will have to come up with a modern day New Deal…the Obama Deal…one that will call on his domestic army of 62,527,406 supporters to help him get the legislation passed he needs to change America. This nation’s finances are on life support, and America needs a face-lift.
However, Obama will be caught in a Catch-22 situation when it comes to repairing America’s weakened economy. With joblessness on the rise, foreclosures multiplying across the nation, Wall Street, which made bad choices, seeking more financial bailouts, the need of yet another economic stimulus, immediate fixing of the monitoring of America’s markets and investment houses, Obama will have to come up with a number of creative short and long-term fixes.
While President George W. Bush enjoyed a $2 trillion surplus thanks to President Bill Clinton, today the nation’s deficit is projected to be around $1.2 trillion. America is in a very deep recession the likes of which has not been seen since World War II, according to The Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
The CBO predicts the “enactment of an economic stimulus package would add to that deficit” and that the deficit predicted for 2010 “falls to 4.9 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) still high by historical standards.”
According to a January 19, 2009 article written by the Associated Press (AP), this government has provided $192.3 billion to 257 both large and small financial institutions in 42 states and Puerto Rico as part of a financial bailout plan. Those in foreclosure didn’t get a dime of this corporate welfare and that is not fair. Wall Street got a bailout but those on Main Street are falling out of jobs and some committed suicide.
Stores like Circuit City are still going out of business, and people on Main Street are still losing their homes due to foreclosures. President Obama will have to restructure the banking system including reforming the Federal Reserve (central banking system) that was created in 1913 and the same banks that are part of today’s financial problems.
I believe Obama should fire the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and replace them with his people. I am also leery about giving Wall Street another bailout without their giving up something in return especially the golden parachutes, which smack in the face of people standing in unemployment lines across America. Why should CEO’s get millions of dollars just to say goodbye? Something is wrong with that picture.
Bad financial times have a ricochet effect that’s bad for business. There is a lock down on credit, which affects lending institutions that trickles down to businesses that need loans to meet payrolls. Consumers are leery about spending and stores are closing as a result. This results in massive job loss across the nation.
President Obama has inherited a mess, but I believe in time he will right the wrongs left at his new doorsteps at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—his new home that ironically was partially built by slaves, but he will need his army ready and willing to help him execute the change platform he ran on.
Obama has already put out a call for volunteers to help him put back the broken pieces of America which has clearly fell off the wall. He needs his supporters to rebuild and restore each community—block-by-block until this nation has been restored.
Mr. President, this nation is ready for change. While expectations will be great, we look up to you for leadership, but it feels good to know we have a President in the White House who first looks up to God for the answers. Congratulation, President Obama, and may God guide and protect you every inch of the way—until America is healed from his past human rights and financial sins.
-30-
Call to service key in bearing this load
By Chinta Strausberg
When the clock strikes noon today, Tuesday, January 20, 2009, Vice President Joe Biden will have already been sworn into office, but the nation’s financial, racial divide, healthcare inequities, educational deficits, environmental weaknesses, and foreign relations demise will fall on the shoulders of President Barack Obama.
Obama, who will become the 44th U.S. president and the first African American, will adhere to Article II, Section I of the U.S. Constitution by taking the following oath:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
While I fear the honeymoon with President Obama will be short lived, thank God America will never be the same again. It will truly be the dawning of a new day, a new nation—one where the 1886 Statute of Liberty will take on a new meaning—one where she will not only welcome immigrants, tourists, and those returning home, but people of all races and religions who want to experience the American dream.
Her torch will become symbolic of the hope that more than 62 million Obama supporters wielded in the ballot box on November 4, 2008. It will become the beacon of change and the beginning of an era that will seek to rectify America’s past wrongs and America’s violations of human and civil rights. It will represent an era where equity will be the cornerstone and the litmus test of the Obama presidency.
No more affirmative action for the wealthy. Let fairness ring from all corners of this nation. The light from the Statute of Liberty will expose every single unfair policy, law or practice and it shall be changed.
The light will represent the truth in exposing and finding viable solutions to the financial quagmire President Obama inherited. The light will shine on new ways to fix old problems like stabilizing Social Security, public hospitals, restructuring student loans, rebuilding America’s infrastructure that includes creating millions of jobs—much like the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a public works program President Franklin D. Roosevelt began for young men whose families were unemployed. It was included in Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression.
Well, President Obama, I believe, will have to come up with a modern day New Deal…the Obama Deal…one that will call on his domestic army of 62,527,406 supporters to help him get the legislation passed he needs to change America. This nation’s finances are on life support, and America needs a face-lift.
However, Obama will be caught in a Catch-22 situation when it comes to repairing America’s weakened economy. With joblessness on the rise, foreclosures multiplying across the nation, Wall Street, which made bad choices, seeking more financial bailouts, the need of yet another economic stimulus, immediate fixing of the monitoring of America’s markets and investment houses, Obama will have to come up with a number of creative short and long-term fixes.
While President George W. Bush enjoyed a $2 trillion surplus thanks to President Bill Clinton, today the nation’s deficit is projected to be around $1.2 trillion. America is in a very deep recession the likes of which has not been seen since World War II, according to The Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
The CBO predicts the “enactment of an economic stimulus package would add to that deficit” and that the deficit predicted for 2010 “falls to 4.9 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) still high by historical standards.”
According to a January 19, 2009 article written by the Associated Press (AP), this government has provided $192.3 billion to 257 both large and small financial institutions in 42 states and Puerto Rico as part of a financial bailout plan. Those in foreclosure didn’t get a dime of this corporate welfare and that is not fair. Wall Street got a bailout but those on Main Street are falling out of jobs and some committed suicide.
Stores like Circuit City are still going out of business, and people on Main Street are still losing their homes due to foreclosures. President Obama will have to restructure the banking system including reforming the Federal Reserve (central banking system) that was created in 1913 and the same banks that are part of today’s financial problems.
I believe Obama should fire the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and replace them with his people. I am also leery about giving Wall Street another bailout without their giving up something in return especially the golden parachutes, which smack in the face of people standing in unemployment lines across America. Why should CEO’s get millions of dollars just to say goodbye? Something is wrong with that picture.
Bad financial times have a ricochet effect that’s bad for business. There is a lock down on credit, which affects lending institutions that trickles down to businesses that need loans to meet payrolls. Consumers are leery about spending and stores are closing as a result. This results in massive job loss across the nation.
President Obama has inherited a mess, but I believe in time he will right the wrongs left at his new doorsteps at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—his new home that ironically was partially built by slaves, but he will need his army ready and willing to help him execute the change platform he ran on.
Obama has already put out a call for volunteers to help him put back the broken pieces of America which has clearly fell off the wall. He needs his supporters to rebuild and restore each community—block-by-block until this nation has been restored.
Mr. President, this nation is ready for change. While expectations will be great, we look up to you for leadership, but it feels good to know we have a President in the White House who first looks up to God for the answers. Congratulation, President Obama, and may God guide and protect you every inch of the way—until America is healed from his past human rights and financial sins.
-30-
Sunday, December 7, 2008
A TRIBUTE TO A CHICAGO TEEN WAR HERO
A SOLILOQUY To Englewood's Vietnam hero
Today, my heart goes out to the families of the more than 4,000 American men and women who lost their lives in the Iraq War and other wars. I extend a similar message of sorrow for the thousands of Iraqis, those in Afghanistan and all other wars--victims who are now just a memory to their families.
This includes innocent women and children, like my cousin, PFC Milton Lee Olive III, 18, who paid the ultimate price to save the lives of four comrades. No, there are no winners or losers in these wars--just the rawness of having to look at an empty chair at a kitchen table for the rest of their lives or the shoes in a closet that will never again be worn, and the painful reminder that there were never any Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)--an allegation that sparked the Iraq war years ago.
That emptiness of losing a love one is the same for families and love ones who were also touched by these wars. Each reported death of yet another American victim is a painful reminder of the empty chair at my own families table—for our soldier, our war hero, Pfc. Milton Lee Olive III whom we affectionately called "Skipper." At 18, Skipper, a very mature and religious teenager, will not only be an unforgettable memory to us but also a hero to the entire world.
Life is about choices, and the choice Skipper made during his voluntary assignment in Vietnam when he was just 18-years old should serve as a model for today’s troubled youth many of them are feeding on violence and taking out each other including innocent children who were caught in the crossfires of gang violence.
Our bible-toging Skipper never did drugs. He was not in a gang. He didn’t swear, never used drugs, and he read his bible every day though he was in combat. While a military man, Skipper was basically a man of peace but one who fiercely loved his country and chose to die for that strong belief--that passion to "complete mission of protecting this country." That nightmare began 43-years ago but the pain, though not as overwhelming, lingers on from generation to generation.
On October 22, 1965 at the age of 18--16-days before his 19th birthday, Skipper spotted a live grenade during a search and destroy mission in Vietnam. Life is about choices.
He bent over and placed the device on his stomach allowing it to explode—an act that saved the lives of four of his comrades. Three of the four survivors are still alive. I have spoken to all of them over the years and each has grandchildren today because of Skipper’s (Milton’s nickname) act of bravery.
Skipper was Uncle Milton’s only child. He was the first African American to have received a Congressional Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War. Uncle Milton talked about his son a lot and he asked me to never forget to remind the world what his son did for this nation.
Skipper was born a special child. He was a breech baby. His biological mother, Clara, died during childbirth. My paternal grandparents, Jacob Augustus and Zelphia Wareagle Spencer, raised Skipper for most of his life in a home in Englewood. Skipper also stayed with Uncle Milton’s parents in Lexington, Mississippi.
But, while still in Chicago, Skipper, who according to our cousin, Dr. Barbara Jean Penelton, was not challenged in high school, dropped out and went back to Mississippi where he joined a Freedom Voter Registration campaign.
When my Uncle Milton found out about that, he gave Skipper three choices: get back in school, get a job, or join the military. Uncle Milton feared the KKK would kill his only child.
Skipper knew Uncle Milton, a former City of Chicago Human Services supervisor, professional photographer, and civil rights activist, meant business. Skipper proudly joined the Army and in fact was injured shortly after that. He won a Purple Heart for his act of bravery but never told his father. Skipper returned to the Army where he chose to die to save the lives of his friends. He was a proud paratrooper and like his dad was also a professional photographer. Upon his death, President Lyndon B. Johnson bestowed another Purple Heart and a Congressional Medal of Honor.
I used to take Skipper's stepmother, Antoinette Marie Mainor Olive, who recently died to numerous Chicago veterans events given by Mayor Richard M. Daley and Illinois Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn. I thank both officials for doing what Uncle Milton always wished—to remind the world what his son did for this nation.
I would also like to thank the late President Lyndon Johnson who on April 21, 1966 during a Rose Garden ceremony bestowed the coveted Congressional of Honor medal to Uncle and his wife, Antoinette.
And, I would also like to thank the late Mayor Richard J. Daley who dedicated Olive Park (500 North Lake Shore Drive) after Skipper. To our knowledge, Chicago has the only lakefront park named after a Congressional of Medal recipient. But thanks also go to Ald. James Balcer Rochelle Crump, assistant director for the Illinois Veterans Affairs Department, Lawrence Pucci, and my cousin, Charlie Carter who grew up in the same home with Skipper, for their friendship to my family and their continued commemoration of Skipper’s heroic deeds.
And on the three survivors, they often told me how Skipper forever changed their lives. I hope those students attending the Olive/Harvey College, visitors who go to the Olive Park like Mr. Pucci who lives across from the park, and those living in the housing developments and military bases throughout the nation that were named after Skipper take a moment and reflect on the heroic acts of my cousin who loved his country so much he willingly paid the ultimate price—his life. We should pay homage to all veterans all year for the sacrifices they made.
Skipper's father and I often had long talks about his only child the family called “Skipper.” He would make me promise never to let the world forget what his son did for this country.
Skipper was the first African American to have received the Congressional Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War. He will always be our hero.
In January 1992, I was visiting my cousin, Charles Carter, in his place of business on the far South Side. Skipper’s father called and he talked to me a very long time about his son and again made me promise never to let the world forget that his son gave the ultimate sacrifice—his life—to save the lives of four of his comrades. Little did I know that was the last time I’d hear his voice. We had talked about Skipper many times at our family reunions in Navy Pier, Michigan, but in 1992, we talked a long time about his desire to have his son's heroic acts remembered for generations to come.
What he gave me was a deathbed wish. My uncle Milton died in March of 1992 and today I honor his request by reminding this nation what a great and brave young man Skipper was. Just 16-days before his 19th birthday, Skipper died doing what he promised--protecting his country. He was an unusual young man who was mission-driven and very loyal to America.
Skipper was a breech baby and his birth mom, Clara, died thrusting him into this world. My paternal grandparents, Jacob Augustus and Zylphia Wareagle Spencer in their Englewood home, raised him. Skipper attended the Copernicus Grade School located in the Englewood community. Like his father, he was a photographer and had a voice of gold. He also briefly stayed with his father’s parents in Lexington, Miss.
But, while still in Chicago, Skipper, who according to our cousin, Dr. Barbara Jean Penelton, was not challenged in high school; so, he dropped out and went back to Mississippi where he joined a Freedom Voter Registration campaign.
When my Uncle Milton, who had remarried to the late Antoinette Marie Manor Olive, a Chicago school teacher, found out about that, he gave Skipper three choices: get back in school, get a job, or join the military. Uncle Milton feared the KKK would kill his only child.
Skipper knew Uncle Milton, a former City of Chicago Human Services supervisor, professional photographer, and civil rights activist, meant business. Skipper proudly joined the Army and in fact was injured shortly after that. He won a Purple Heart for his act of bravery but never told his father. Skipper, then a paratrooper, returned to the Army where he chose to die to save the lives of four friends who wee directly behind him during a search and destroy mission in Vietnam. Skipper was a proud paratrooper and like his dad was also a professional photographer.
I used to take Skipper stepmother to numerous Chicago veterans events given by Mayor Richard M. Daley and Illinois Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn. I thank both officials for doing what Uncle Milton always wished—to remind the world what his son did for this nation. I also thank Chuck Bowen, former executive assistant to Mayor Daley, and Col. Eugene Scott for their part in remembering Skipper's military feats.
And I thank the late President Lyndon Johnson who on April 21, 1966 during a Rose Garden ceremony bestowed the coveted Congressional of Honor medal to Uncle and his wife, Antoinette.
And, I would also like to thank the late Mayor Richard J. Daley who dedicated Olive Park (500 North Lake Shore Drive) after Skipper thanks to the lobbying efforts of the late Bishop Louis Henry Ford. To our knowledge, Chicago has the only lakefront park named after a Congressional of Medal recipient. But thanks also go to Chuck Bowen, former executive assistant to Mayor Daley, Ald. James Balcer, Rochelle Crump, former assistant director for the Illinois Veterans Affairs Department, veterans advocate Lawrence Pucci, and my cousins, Dr. Barbara Jean Penelton and Charlie Carter who grew up in the same home with Skipper, for helping to keep the legacy of Skipper alive.
I also thank Cook County Board President Todd H. Stroger for hosting a Thanksgiving Turkey Giveaway at the Copernicus Elementary School in Chicago where Skipper once attended. Our war hero lived the kind of life I wish today's youth would emulate.
Skipper never had a girlfriend, never dated, and he didn't drink or swear. He chose to die to save the lives of his friends.
How I wish our youth of today could be as focused and brave as Skipper. How I wish they could adopt his high morals and respect for their peers and the elderly. If Skipper were alive today, I have no doubt he would be out there marching against the senseless violence that has taken the lives of scores of children this year and the wounding of many more. As my pastor, Saint Sabina's Father Michael L. Pfleger, says of the killings "it just won't stop."
Every time a Chicago Public school child is shot, Pfleger now dispatches an emergency team to the site of the shooting where he offers a $5,000 reward for the shooter. He also calls on Illinois lawmakers to pass sensible gun laws. Pfleger has started a national debate after he turned the American flag upside down which is a sign of distress. After the deaths of 38 Chicago Public School students this year alone, Pfleger feels our communities are in distress.
The popular priest said: "it takes a village to raise a child, but the villages that produced Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King" and others "no longer exist. The communities no longer produce such giants" instead they are becoming dugouts for child killers, apathy, and a serious disconnect to each other. "We need some construction workers" to rebuild our communities," he said. "In Illinois, we have 24,000 black men in prison but only 11,000 black men in college." That, he said, is unacceptable and called for an end to the violence that is giving a black eye to Chicago and other urban areas.
Pfleger has also called on President Barack Obama to provide the same kind of financial and outreach support he executed in warning Americans about the Swine Flu, which has taken the lives of two Americans. Every time an illegal gun is fired, it leaves behind a broken family, hurt and bewildered students, and a feeling of hopelessness of funeral owners like Spencer Leak, Sr. who often buries these students for free.
To Skipper, I say thank you for your heroic act of bravery. Because of you, the four men you saved have grandchildren today, and your choosing death over life has admittedly taught one of the four not to hate African Americans. One of the three survivors has died, but I guess in death there was born a renewed life in your fellow comrades—a spirit of oneness…a spirit of love and respect for humanity no matter what color one may be.
And the three survivors often told me how Skipper forever changed their lives. I hope those students attending the Olive/Harvey College, the visitors who go to the Olive Park like Mr. Pucci who lives across from the park, and those living in the housing developments and military bases throughout the nation that were named after Skipper take a moment and reflect on the heroic acts of my cousin who loved his country so much he willingly paid the ultimate price—his life. Today, we should pay homage to all veterans. Disagree with the war if you will, but never turn your back on our soldiers. They need your moral support.
Thank you Skipper for your vision and acceptance of all men as your brothers and may all of us remember what you taught us—to believe in yourself, fight against injustices, but respect our country and people of all ethnic groups and religions. Skipper, you even loved some of your comrades who hated you because of the color of your skin. One of the men you saved apologized for hating you because you were Black and though white has now joined the NAACP. He is a changed man thanks to your love for mankind.
Ironically, it was the KKK who desecrated Skipper grave in Lexington, MS, and in Chicago someone defaced the plaque in Olive Park. These hateful acts went against the grain of Skipper's belief--that all men are born equal before the eyes of God. That was the fabric this young man was made of and at such a tender age. Thanks go out to my paternal grandparents for laying the moral character of this war hero whose spilled blood saved the lives of four men all of whom have grandchildren. Skipper's love just keep on going--generation after generation.
Chinta Strausberg
May 25, 2009
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Official data from the federal government:
Name: MILTON L. OLIVE III
Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Army, Company B, 2d Battalion (Airborne), 503d Infantry, 173d Airborne Brigade.
Place: Phu Cuong, Republic of Vietnam
Date: 22 October 1965
Entered service at: Chicago, Ill.
Born: 7 November 1946, Chicago, Ill.
G.O. No.: C.O. No.: 18, 26 April 1966.
Citation:
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Pfc. Olive was a member of the 3d Platoon of Company B, as it moved through the jungle to find the Viet Cong operating in the area. Although the platoon was subjected to a heavy volume of enemy gunfire and pinned down temporarily, it retaliated by assaulting the Viet Cong positions, causing the enemy to flee. As the platoon pursued the insurgents, Pfc. Olive and four other soldiers were moving through the jungle together with a grenade was thrown into their midst. Pfc. Olive saw the grenade, and then saved the lives of his fellow soldiers at the sacrifice of his by grabbing the grenade in his hand and falling on it to absorb the blast with his body. Through his bravery, unhesitating actions, and complete disregard for his safety, he prevented additional loss of life or injury to the members of his platoon. Pfc. Olive's extraordinary heroism, at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty are in the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and reflect great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of his country.
Here is a Chicago Tribune article written by a former colleague, Don Terry, who writes for the Chicago Tribune. Don and I met when I was a political reporter for the Chicago Defender newspaper.
THE MEN OF OLIVE COMPANY; FOUR SOLDIERS SURVIVED VIETNAM BECAUSE MILTON OLIVE DIDN'T
Chicago Tribune, 12 May 2002
By Don Terry
The other guys who came back to their Chicago neighborhood on leave couldn't wait to snatch off their uniforms and run the streets one last time before shipping out to Vietnam. Not Milton "Skipper" Olive. The kid was so proud he practically slept in his.
You'd get up for breakfast and there was Skipper in his uniform, buttering his toast. You'd say goodnight and there he was, nodding off on the sofa in his Army greens, the shadow of a smile marching across his face. Hut, two, three.
No doubt he would have worn his uniform out for a night on the town, but his father, Big Milton, kept him close to home. Milton was just 17.
Skipper, an only child, was "indulged," to put it politely. He got new bicycles for his birthday and cameras for Christmas. At family gatherings, when his cousins were dressed in jeans and t- shirts, he was often decked out in a suit that matched his dad's.
So it surprised his cousins that he had enlisted and become, of all things, a paratrooper. My goodness. He wasn't 6 feet tall standing on a stepladder. His rifle and rucksack probably weighed as much as he did.
True, he had always been on the thin side. But he had also displayed, from his first breath, what folks called grit. His mother, Clara Lee, died four hours after delivering him. The doctors didn't think her fragile baby boy would live more than a day or two.
But he lived: 18 years, 11 months and 15 days.
Then on Oct. 22, 1965, ambushed in a Vietnam jungle, Milton L. Olive III threw himself on a hand grenade to save four soldiers he hardly knew. Six months later, on April 21, with cherry blossoms in full bloom and war protests rumbling on the horizon, President Lyndon Johnson posthumously awarded Olive the Medal of Honor. In a Rose Garden ceremony, flanked by Mayor Richard J. Daley, the Olive family and two of the saved men--one black, one white--Johnson said that Olive's "instinct of loyalty" caused him to put others first and himself last. "In dying," the president said, "Pvt. Milton Olive taught those of us who remain how we ought to live."
Forever 18, Olive is buried in an all-black cemetery behind a small church in a Mississippi farming town. Today he is memorialized by Olive Terrace at Ft. Gordon near Augusta, Ga., Olive- Harvey community college on Chicago's Far South Side and Olive Park on the edge of the lake, just north of Navy Pier.
The men he saved are now grandfathers and great-grandfathers. There's little chance you've heard of them, yet they, too, are heroes. The ordinary, everyday heroes we send off to war and then forget. This is their story: who they were and who they became because a skinny teenager from the South Side gave them the gift of life.
At 73, Vince Yrineo, the Mexican-American platoon sergeant, is the oldest. For years after the ambush, slivers of shrapnel still worked their way out of his skin and snagged on his shirt. They fell to the floor like teardrops.
He still saves a tattered piece of metal from that day. It is Milton Olive's dog tag. It's about an inch long and weighs no more than a nickel. One edge looks as if a wild animal took a bite out of it; another has been pierced by something evil, leaving a jagged hole in its once-shiny silver skin. Yrineo has kept it for 37 years. "To me," he says, "it's something sacred."
Lionel Hubbard, the black private from west Texas, is 57. Still tall, but not as lean, he hopes to retire from his oil refinery job in a couple of years. He wants to concentrate on the nine houses he and his wife of 36 years own and rent out near Houston.
He tries not to think about Vietnam. "But if it wasn't for Milton," he says, "I know I wouldn't be here talking to you right now."
The other private, John Foster, a black boxer from Pittsburgh, is 56. The guys used to call him "Hop" because he was so fast in the ring and on the football field. He has lost sight in his left eye and part of his left foot to diabetes. Nobody calls him Hop anymore.
"I know that since Milton died," he says, "I'm living for two people, not one." Along with another ambush survivor, Foster attended the Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House.
Finally, there is Jimmy Stanford, the white lieutenant struggling to overcome a racist streak. He lives in San Antonio and is working on his fourth marriage. At 66, his hair is white as Texas cotton. His new wife is from Korea. Once upon a time, if anyone had told him he would end up marrying "a minority gal," he would have said they were crazy. He might have asked them to step outside.
"Milton Olive changed me," he says. "I made a vow never to forget him."
THE JUNGLE
The men of 3rd Platoon, Company B, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade, are humping and chopping their way through jungle so thick it swallows up the sunlight--and the Viet Cong. It's hot as an oven and Charlie's invisible. But he's out there, all right. And he's close. He has been sniping at Company B--the Bravo Bulls--off and on for most of the day.
Several hours have passed since a flock of helicopters plunked the paratroopers down somewhere in the vicinity of Phu Cuong early this October morning.
The orders sound simple enough. They always do to the brass in the back.
Search and destroy.
The problem is, the enemy is like a ghost and it's his haunted house. Death and Charlie are everywhere and nowhere.
A sniper already has killed George Luis, of Hawaii. A head shot. Nasty.
The platoon sergeant, Vince Yrineo, has to remind the men and him to keep moving. Mourn later.
At 36, Yrineo was a military lifer. A Los Angeles native, at 17 he enlisted in the Navy just after World War II, got out, played civilian for a while and then joined the Army when he got bored. He volunteered as a paratrooper after some jackass told him he didn't have the guts to jump out of a plane.
His divorced mother, Dolores, was from the old country, Mexico, and did whatever it took to keep her family of five boys and one girl from spending even one hungry night. She was a seamstress, a cook and, to hear her bemused son tell it, a successful bootlegger. "As a matter of fact," he says, "she bought a couple of houses with her earnings."
Yrineo's four brothers served in World War II. He wanted to be just like them even though he got disgusted with his country when his Japanese-American neighbors were rounded up at the beginning of the war and sent to internment camps. "It really teed me off," he says. "It still does. They were Americans like everybody else."
Third Platoon is on the right flank of the company when it comes to a clearing in the jungle, a burned-out patch of brown and black littered with charred tree stumps.
Jimmy Stanford, at 29 a senior citizen as first lieutenants go, doesn't have to remind his men to keep their eyes open and their trigger fingers ready. He does anyway.
He's the platoon leader, rotated in just three days ago. Not one of those West Point officers, Stanford is an enlisted man with ambition. It took him 11 years to earn his bars.
He joined the Army in 1954 when he was 18, a couple of years after dropping out of high school.
He was following family tradition. Stanford men have been putting on uniforms and marching off to battle since the War Between the States. His great-grandfather wore gray, a private in Company G, 46th Georgia Infantry. His daddy was a doughboy in World War I and survived a fog of poison gas rolling through his trench in France.
Stanford loved being a soldier. Still, working so closely with blacks and Latinos took some getting used to. Lake Jackson, Texas, was a segregated town and Stanford couldn't remember seeing blacks after dark as a kid in the 1930s and '40s. "They stayed in their place," he says. "We stayed in ours."
He learned that lesson early in life. A black woman worked for his family when he was 6 or 7. She had a son about his age and the two boys got to be pals. One day when Stanford was playing with his friend, his daddy came along and chased the boy off, telling him to go play with his own kind.
After that, when Stanford crossed paths with blacks and Latinos, "I'd give them hell," he says. "It was just normal racial harassment, nothing serious, practical jokes, name-calling, kid stuff."
In the jungles of Vietnam, Stanford didn't care if a soldier was black, white or blue so long as he did his job. But sometimes his upbringing showed. He once called a meeting of his squad leaders, two of whom were black, and told Yrineo to "go get those niggers."
The platoon begins moving through the clearing, when suddenly the thick, hot air is filled with bullets and grenades and the sound and smell of men getting hit by lead. Third Platoon has walked into an ambush.
"We didn't even see where it was coming from," says Hop Foster, then a 19-year-old private. "Either they opened up the ground and threw it up or they were up in the trees and tossed it down."
Just a couple of years earlier, Hop Foster's biggest worry in the world was where to celebrate with his black and Italian teammates after the Chiefs had beaten another opponent. For three years in a row, the Chiefs ruled sandlot football in Pittsburgh.
The son of a barroom bouncer and a domestic worker, Foster joined the Army at 18 because he needed a job after dropping out of school in 11th grade. But there was another reason he enlisted.
"I thought I was earning my citizenship by going into the service," he says. "I was paying my dues. Nobody could ever call me a second-class citizen now."
When the shooting starts, Lionel Hubbard, a 20-year-old private, dives behind what's left of a tree stump. "There was nothing else," he says. "If you raised up, you were dead."
The noise of battle is tremendous. So is the adrenaline roaring through Hubbard's slim body like a Texas twister.
His folks ran a cafe in Brownfield, Texas. They catered to the workers at the cotton compressor, and Hubbard helped out after school and on weekends. He joined the Army after graduating from high school because he didn't want to spend the rest of his life in a cafe.
He volunteered for the paratroopers because they were the toughest, the bravest, the elite. He loved jumping out of airplanes. But when he got to Nam, it took him a long time before he would shoot at the enemy. "I didn't want to fight because I didn't have nothing against the Vietnamese," he says. "It's more than a notion to take a person's life."
His first weeks there, he couldn't sleep. He couldn't eat. He watched people die. Young people just like him were shot to pieces. Body bags lined up in the mud waited for the choppers to take them away. "After a while," he says, "I started shooting at everything that moved. I still didn't want to fight. I still didn't have nothing against the Vietnamese. But it was either them or me."
Hubbard is pinned down with a cluster of men, hiding behind stumps, faces buried in the dirt, bullets whistling inches over their heads, grenades coming in. The men are too close together. Stanford, Foster and Yrineo are lying near Hubbard and so is the skinny kid from Chicago, Milt Olive.
It surprised some of the guys that Olive was from Chi-town. As Hop Foster says, even a blind man could see he wasn't one of those street-smart kind of cats. He was more like the guy who quietly plays chess in the corner of the juke joint, near the fun but not all the way in it. "He was kind of clean-cut," Foster says.
On the other hand, he wasn't a square, either. He didn't cuss like a lot of his Army buddies, but he didn't get shocked if someone else did.
Olive joined B Company as a replacement in July, almost four months before he was killed. He had a dry wit like his father. In a letter that summer to his cousin Barbara Penelton, who now heads the department of education at Bradley University, Skipper called himself "Uncle Sam's Number One Man in Viet Nam."
"Just a line to say hello," he wrote. "I'm over here in Never Never Land fighting this hellish war." Things had been "pretty tough" but they had "a ball" roasting wieners on sticks and "then we gathered around the fire."
"You said I was crazy for joining up," he continued, "well, I've gone you one better. I'm now an official U.S. Army Paratrooper. How does that grab you? I've made six jumps already."
He was wounded slightly in a firefight soon after joining the outfit, but never told his father. He didn't want to worry him.
The father, Milton B. Olive Jr., thought joining the Army would be good for his son, make a man of him. The boy would be fine. America was at peace when he signed up in 1964. No one had heard of Vietnam.
Big Milton clearly was devoted to his boy, dressing him in matching father-and-son suits, teaching him photography, giving him his name and the name of his father, but with one difference. When he took his frail son home from the hospital, he named him Milton Lee in memory of his late wife, Clara Lee.
Perhaps that's why Skipper always seemed more mature than other children. He had been on a first-name basis with death and loss since the day he was born. "He took everything serious," says Leonard Hampton, a childhood friend. "He was a little bit conservative. He didn't hang too tough with the guys."
His father's cousin raised little Milton for the first several years of his life. The boy also spent a lot of time with his father's parents on their farm in Mississippi. In 1952, Big Milton married a schoolteacher, Antoinette Mainor. Skipper returned to his father's house for a few years, but attended high school in Mississippi.
Before he dropped out of school to join the Army at 17, Skipper was already fighting for his country. He was helping civil-rights workers register black people to vote in the backwoods of Lexington, Miss. When his grandmother found out what he was doing, she had his father take him back up North. A few years earlier, another black boy from Chicago who misunderstood the way of the South, Emmett Till, had been lynched.
The family thought Skipper would be safer in the Army.
A bullet slams through Foster's helmet and rips off a piece of his eyebrow. "How bad?" he asks the man lying next to him.
"You'll live," Olive grins.
Moments later, a grenade lands in the middle of the five men.
"[It] was about a foot from my face," Stanford recalls. "Then out comes this black hand and grabs it."
According to Stanford, the last thing Olive says is, "Look out, Lieutenant, grenade!"
According to Foster, the last thing Olive says is, "Look out, Hop, grenade!"
The last thing Olive does is shove the grenade under his body, taking the full force of the blast. It throws him into the air and flips him over on his back.
"I heard a muffled sound," Foster says. "Then for some reason it seemed like everything went real quiet. It was like they stopped the war after that."
But the war hasn't stopped. GIs are getting hit left and right. Shrapnel hits Hubbard. The toes on his left foot are dangling by a thin thread of skin. His boot is filled with blood.
Shrapnel smashes into Yrineo's face, arm and chest.
Hubbard and Yrineo have to be carried to a chopper. Hubbard spends three weeks in the hospital; Yrineo spends five days.
Stanford is hit too, but he doesn't realize it until he's back at the base camp and sees that his shirt is soaked with blood. All told, more than a dozen men are wounded.
Charlie whispers away into the jungle like a ghost.
A few days later and 10,000 miles away, a man in a suit climbed the stone steps of a bungalow on the South Side of Chicago and rang the bell. Inside, preparing dinner, was Antoinette Olive, Skipper's stepmother.
The man had a letter in his hand.
"Is someone here with you?" he asked.
"No."
The man said he would stay until she finished the letter in case she needed assistance.
"He knew what he was doing," she recalls. "You could tell he had done it before."
The letter said her stepson had died for his country and his parents should be proud. "I was just numb," she says. "In the movies you see people reading these letters, and they just fall apart. But when it happens to you, you're just numb. You see it, you see the letters making the words that say your child is gone, but you just don't believe it."
The Army sent Olive's belongings to his parents, including an AM/ FM radio, a Bible and a camera. Olive loved taking photographs with his father, who made a few extra bucks snapping newlyweds and church picnics. Stuck inside the pages of his Bible was a business card his father had made for him years earlier: Milton Olive III, Chicago's only 12-year-old Professional Photographer.
Before Olive's body arrived home, his family was worried that he would have to have a closed-casket funeral because of the blast. But the grenade had not damaged his face. The war had.
"Oh my, how he had aged," his stepmother says.
THE SARGE
After all these years, the Sarge is still looking out for his men.
In a big red notebook in the small brick house where he lives alone just outside Tacoma, Wash., Vince Yrineo keeps the names of the eight men from his platoon who died during his first tour of duty. Each has a page in his sergeant's holy book, including the kid from Chicago, Milton Olive.
The Sarge also logs the dates they were born and when the Army stamped them KIA--killed in action. He keeps their hometowns and their serial numbers. He keeps their memories and his regrets. "So many young kids," he says, shaking his head, the book open in his lap. "They never had a chance to live. It makes you think the whole thing was a big waste."
They were killed by snipers and by exploding shells, by enemy ambushes and by friendly fire. They were killed despite his best efforts to keep them alive, to send them home to their families. "My son was about 12 years old at the time," the Sarge says. "I tried to think of the people I was in charge of as being him."
Milton Olive has a special place in his heart and in his house. On a nightstand next to the bed, Yrineo has a small photo of his deceased son on a laminated funeral card, dead at 23 from diabetes, along with a Bible and a crucifix. But looming over the bedside shrine is a framed black and white, 8-by-10 photograph of Milton Olive in uniform, his doe eyes peering out from the past.
Yrineo has had the photo for 27 years. He has had Olive's dog tag for even longer, ever since a young grunt wiped away the blood and jungle grime and handed it to Yrineo in 1965. "Here, Sarge," he said, "you'll know what to do with this."
He keeps the tag on a bed of cotton in an earring box. He always meant to give it to Olive's father. Maybe it would give the old man a little comfort. Or maybe it would break his heart all over again, Yrineo wasn't sure. So he kept it, and the years passed and so did Milton Olive's father, who died in 1993 before Yrineo could work up the nerve to part with the tag.
Now Jimmy Stanford, his old platoon leader, wants the tag. Of all the guys Milton Olive saved that day, Stanford admits to being changed the most. "A day doesn't go by that I don't think about it," he says.
When Yrineo showed him the dog tag a few years ago at a reunion, Stanford started bugging him for it.
No way, Yrineo said, no way in the world.
But Stanford kept pestering him and eventually they struck a deal.
"I told Jimmy if he outlives me he can have it," Yrineo says, leaning back in his living room recliner. "But that's the only way he's going to get it."
Stanford could have a long wait. At 73, Yrineo looks as though he could still fit into his old uniform. Every morning, if the weather is decent, he goes out into his back yard and raises the flag. Every evening at 5, he lowers it.
The ritual reminds him of the why of his life.
PRIVATE HUBBARD
Of the four men Milton Olive saved, Lionel Hubbard has built the highest wall around his soul to keep the past out.
He doesn't have his dog tags anymore and he can't find his Purple Heart. He was going to buy one on the Internet, but decided he didn't need it. The Purple Heart license plate on his truck is good enough for him.
On his fireplace mantel sits a black and white photograph of Hubbard in fatigues, the 173rd Airborne patch on his shoulder, a smile on his face. The photo reminds him of how thin he used to be as much as anything else. He'd like to lose a few pounds, but at 57 he's holding his own.
He doesn't go to reunions and he is not in touch with his old Army buddies. His scrapbook from Vietnam, the one with the photographs of dead comrades hung from trees by Charlie and dead VC with their ears cut off--"payback," he explains--was lost a long time ago. For years, he thought his wife had deliberately thrown it out, worried that the ghosts would disturb his sleep. She says it was inadvertently lost in a move.
Sometimes he misses the book. But mostly he thinks it's good that it's gone. He hasn't tried to forget exactly. He just hasn't tried to remember. Forgetting is impossible anyway. Whenever he gets dressed in the morning or undressed at night, Vietnam and Milton Olive are there, embedded in his calves.
"See those little black spots?" he says, rolling up his pants legs. "All grenade fragments from that day."
Then he unlaces his left work boot. He pulls off his sock and wiggles his toes. Two of the toes are gnarled and discolored, smaller than they should be. "I prayed to God every day I was over there, `Please let me make it back,' " he says. "Thanks to God and Milton, I did. Almost in one piece."
Hubbard has built a steady and comfortable life for himself and his family on a manmade lake in Texas City, Texas, about 35 miles south of Houston. He married his high school sweetheart, Madeline, in 1966, the year after Milton jumped on the grenade.
For the last 20 years he has worked at the Marathon plant, blending gasoline. His supervisor at work, Danny Anthony, also served in Nam. He was a medic. "I carried a lot of body bags," he says. When he and Hubbard talk, it's almost never about Vietnam.
Hubbard has three grown children, all born after Milton Olive died. He also has a granddaughter, money in the bank and plans to retire in a couple of years so he and his wife can travel around the country in a camper. "Life ain't been half bad," he says.
Every once in a while there will be a story on the news about war vets returning to Vietnam, searching "for closure or something, I guess," Hubbard speculates. "Me, I don't ever want to go back. I didn't lose anything over there."
HOP
The city of Miami is still waking up when John Foster's wife, Lula Mae, drives him to the VA hospital for his thrice-weekly, four- hour dialysis treatment. At 56, kidney failure and diabetes, what Foster calls "sugar," are slowly eating him away. He has lost the sight in his left eye, and part of his left foot has been amputated. "Vietnam didn't do me this much damage," he says.
At the VA, Foster eases into a chair and nods good morning to the vet from Korea and the one from Desert Storm. The wife of another old soldier hands him a cup of coffee. She always has coffee for the Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning regulars. "It's like a family," Foster says.
Foster stands out in this room full of veterans and beeping blood machines. He has a long, gray beard, a gold hoop earring and a skullcap.
"I really think my life was spared for a purpose," he says. "I'm not going to be Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, but if there's one soul I can save, one person I can help up, then my life was saved for a reason. I think it was so I could help spread the word of God. All I can do with the gift Milton gave me is to try to pass it on."
Foster is a follower of Yahweh Ben Yahweh, the self-proclaimed prophet of a sect of "black Hebrews" in Miami that worshiped at the "Temple of Love" and preached that its members were the chosen people of the Yahweh Nation.
"In other religions they don't talk about black people, like we don't exist," Foster says. "He showed us how we were in the Bible all along. He wasn't being anti-white, he was being pro-black."
When Foster first got out of the service in 1966, he was adrift. "It took me a long time to get over Vietnam," he says.
He knocked around Pittsburgh and New York for several years, doing maintenance work, partying and occasionally going to church. "I guess you could say I was searching," he says. "I asked myself, 'Why me? Why was my life saved?' "
He moved to Miami in 1975 and was hired to manage the executive parking lot of a local television station. In 1978, he became a follower of the charismatic Yahweh Ben Yahweh. "Yahweh is the best thing to happen to me since Milton saved my life," Foster says. "If I have to lay my life down now, I'm ready. I feel I know God."
After amassing a small empire of buildings, cars and good deeds in the 1980s, the sect was brought down in the early '90s by a federal racketeering indictment that included several counts of murder. Yahweh Ben Yahweh was acquitted of the most serious charges against him but served nine years in prison for conspiracy. Several other members were also sent to prison.
Foster, known within the troubled nation as Enoch Israel, was also indicted and spent three years in jail awaiting trial. A federal jury could not reach a verdict. After a plea agreement on state charges, he was released in 1994.
Once again, Milton Olive had helped save Foster.
Foster's lawyer in the federal case, Chris Mancini, told the jury about Foster's good character, his long and steady blue-collar work history, his military service and his Purple Heart. Then he showed the panel a photograph.
It was of Foster standing tall and proud in his uniform, looking over the shoulder of President Johnson at the White House during the Rose Garden ceremony for Milton Olive.
"I told them the whole story," Mancini says. "I told them that John was very moved by that kid."
THE LIEUTENANT
Jimmy Stanford is hurrying through the lunchtime crowd along the San Antonio Riverwalk, headed for the restroom, hoping for a little privacy. His eyes are starting to well up talking about what Milton Olive did for him and he doesn't want anyone to see him let loose.
He figures it's more than a little embarrassing, a past vice president of the Special Forces Association of San Antonio, with two tours in Nam under his belt and a Purple Heart on his wall, a mature man, as they say, with 13 grandchildren, a great-grandchild and a second on the way, crying in front of a bunch of tourists throwing tortilla chips at the ducks. People might think he's shell-shocked or something.
Coming back to the table a few minutes later, he says you'd reckon that at age 66 he wouldn't still get so emotional about something that happened 37 years ago, but the boy saved his life.
And opened his heart.
"His act definitely changed me," Stanford says, taking a long pull on his beer. "But it didn't happen overnight. I was a real redneck. I didn't just wake up one morning and say, 'I'm going to quit feeling negative about blacks.' It took several years."
He agrees it's a shameful commentary that Milton Olive had to jump on a hand grenade to push Stanford down this trail, but that's how it was. He's not proud of it; he's just trying to be honest.
He's not saying he's perfect now, either. He knows he still has work to do on his soul. He asks, Who doesn't?
It has been a rocky journey, not much different from the one the country he protected for 24 years as a soldier has been on since the civil rights movement. "I've tried to live a better life," he says. "I know I've treated people more fairly. Tolerance alone won't do it. You've got to trust one another."
He says what's happened to him lately is living proof that even an old, old dog can learn new tricks. After all, his fourth wife, Judy, is Korean. They got married last May. As far as he's concerned, Milton Olive was the best man.
She reaches across the table and gives his arm a squeeze.
"I think I got a good antique," she says, referring to their 13- year age difference.
His eyes are getting misty again.
Stanford has been sending Christmas cards to Olive's parents for 30 years. "I wanted to let his family know that I was grateful," he says. He used to address the cards to Mr. and Mrs. Olive until the father passed away in 1993 at age 81. His widow still has a stack of Christmas cards from Stanford, the latest one postmarked December 2001.
Stanford stayed in the Army for 13 years after Olive died. He says that back in 1970, the military went on "a sensitivity kick." Tension between black soldiers and white soldiers in Vietnam had grown increasingly thick, a reflection of troubles at home. The Army had to do something.
During his last four years in uniform, Stanford was assigned to the Army's Office of Race Relations and Equal Opportunity. He worked with a black sergeant, setting up seminars on race. "We were what they called a salt-and-pepper team," he says. "He was the good guy and I was the bad guy."
He says the Army figured the other white soldiers would be more willing to listen to one of their own, a veteran with a Texas accent. His buddies were not thrilled with the military or with him. They felt "a nigger program" was being shoved down their throats. "I lost some friends when I got into that field of work," Stanford says.
After leaving the Army, Stanford tried his hand at the home contracting business and spent 17 years at Dow Chemical. Now he works in the service department of a Cadillac dealership.
His narrow escape from Vietnam is never far from his thoughts. In 1991, he decided to visit Milton Olive's grave. The problem was, he wasn't sure where it was. Chicago, he assumed. He wrote Olive's father to make sure.
The old man quickly wrote back. Stanford still has the letter. "Thanks so much for remembering us," the father wrote. "You are the only one who has done so." He told Stanford that his son was buried in Lexington, Miss. He gave him some phone numbers of relatives he could stay with.
The next spring, Stanford had a wreath of plastic flowers made up in red, white and blue, arranged to look like a flag. He loaded it in his van and drove to Lexington and the small cemetery next to West Grove Church. There waiting for him was Olive's father, who had driven down from Chicago.
The two men had not seen each other since the Medal of Honor ceremony in 1966. They embraced, and Stanford laid his wreath. He stepped back from the grave, raised his trembling hand and saluted his fallen comrade.
Several of Olive's cousins walked up, stood beside Stanford and began to sing. They asked him to join. At first he begged off. His eyes and voice were full of tears. He turned away to regain his composure and then he, too, began to sing.
"I once was lost but now am found; was blind, but now I see."
Additional Data:
--- General / Personal ---
Last name: OLIVE
First name: MILTON LEE III
Home of Record (official): CHICAGO
State (official): IL
Date of Birth: Thursday, November 7, 1946
Sex: Male
Race: Negro
Marital Status: Single
--- Military ---
Branch: Army
Rank: PFC
Serial Number: 16810165
Component: Regular
Pay grade: E3
MOS (Military Occupational Specialty code): 11B1P
--- Action ---
Start of Tour: Saturday, June 5, 1965
Date of Casualty: Friday, October 22, 1965
Age at time of loss: 18
Casualty type: (A1) Hostile, died
Reason: Other explosive device (Ground casualty)
Country: South VietNam
Province: Unknown/Not Reported
The Wall: Panel 02E
MAY 25, 2009
Today, my heart goes out to the families of the more than 4,000 American men and women who lost their lives in the Iraq War and other wars. I extend a similar message of sorrow for the thousands of Iraqis, those in Afghanistan and all other wars--victims who are now just a memory to their families.
This includes innocent women and children, like my cousin, PFC Milton Lee Olive III, 18, who paid the ultimate price to save the lives of four comrades. No, there are no winners or losers in these wars--just the rawness of having to look at an empty chair at a kitchen table for the rest of their lives or the shoes in a closet that will never again be worn, and the painful reminder that there were never any Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)--an allegation that sparked the Iraq war years ago.
That emptiness of losing a love one is the same for families and love ones who were also touched by these wars. Each reported death of yet another American victim is a painful reminder of the empty chair at my own families table—for our soldier, our war hero, Pfc. Milton Lee Olive III whom we affectionately called "Skipper." At 18, Skipper, a very mature and religious teenager, will not only be an unforgettable memory to us but also a hero to the entire world.
Life is about choices, and the choice Skipper made during his voluntary assignment in Vietnam when he was just 18-years old should serve as a model for today’s troubled youth many of them are feeding on violence and taking out each other including innocent children who were caught in the crossfires of gang violence.
Our bible-toging Skipper never did drugs. He was not in a gang. He didn’t swear, never used drugs, and he read his bible every day though he was in combat. While a military man, Skipper was basically a man of peace but one who fiercely loved his country and chose to die for that strong belief--that passion to "complete mission of protecting this country." That nightmare began 43-years ago but the pain, though not as overwhelming, lingers on from generation to generation.
On October 22, 1965 at the age of 18--16-days before his 19th birthday, Skipper spotted a live grenade during a search and destroy mission in Vietnam. Life is about choices.
He bent over and placed the device on his stomach allowing it to explode—an act that saved the lives of four of his comrades. Three of the four survivors are still alive. I have spoken to all of them over the years and each has grandchildren today because of Skipper’s (Milton’s nickname) act of bravery.
Skipper was Uncle Milton’s only child. He was the first African American to have received a Congressional Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War. Uncle Milton talked about his son a lot and he asked me to never forget to remind the world what his son did for this nation.
Skipper was born a special child. He was a breech baby. His biological mother, Clara, died during childbirth. My paternal grandparents, Jacob Augustus and Zelphia Wareagle Spencer, raised Skipper for most of his life in a home in Englewood. Skipper also stayed with Uncle Milton’s parents in Lexington, Mississippi.
But, while still in Chicago, Skipper, who according to our cousin, Dr. Barbara Jean Penelton, was not challenged in high school, dropped out and went back to Mississippi where he joined a Freedom Voter Registration campaign.
When my Uncle Milton found out about that, he gave Skipper three choices: get back in school, get a job, or join the military. Uncle Milton feared the KKK would kill his only child.
Skipper knew Uncle Milton, a former City of Chicago Human Services supervisor, professional photographer, and civil rights activist, meant business. Skipper proudly joined the Army and in fact was injured shortly after that. He won a Purple Heart for his act of bravery but never told his father. Skipper returned to the Army where he chose to die to save the lives of his friends. He was a proud paratrooper and like his dad was also a professional photographer. Upon his death, President Lyndon B. Johnson bestowed another Purple Heart and a Congressional Medal of Honor.
I used to take Skipper's stepmother, Antoinette Marie Mainor Olive, who recently died to numerous Chicago veterans events given by Mayor Richard M. Daley and Illinois Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn. I thank both officials for doing what Uncle Milton always wished—to remind the world what his son did for this nation.
I would also like to thank the late President Lyndon Johnson who on April 21, 1966 during a Rose Garden ceremony bestowed the coveted Congressional of Honor medal to Uncle and his wife, Antoinette.
And, I would also like to thank the late Mayor Richard J. Daley who dedicated Olive Park (500 North Lake Shore Drive) after Skipper. To our knowledge, Chicago has the only lakefront park named after a Congressional of Medal recipient. But thanks also go to Ald. James Balcer Rochelle Crump, assistant director for the Illinois Veterans Affairs Department, Lawrence Pucci, and my cousin, Charlie Carter who grew up in the same home with Skipper, for their friendship to my family and their continued commemoration of Skipper’s heroic deeds.
And on the three survivors, they often told me how Skipper forever changed their lives. I hope those students attending the Olive/Harvey College, visitors who go to the Olive Park like Mr. Pucci who lives across from the park, and those living in the housing developments and military bases throughout the nation that were named after Skipper take a moment and reflect on the heroic acts of my cousin who loved his country so much he willingly paid the ultimate price—his life. We should pay homage to all veterans all year for the sacrifices they made.
Skipper's father and I often had long talks about his only child the family called “Skipper.” He would make me promise never to let the world forget what his son did for this country.
Skipper was the first African American to have received the Congressional Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War. He will always be our hero.
In January 1992, I was visiting my cousin, Charles Carter, in his place of business on the far South Side. Skipper’s father called and he talked to me a very long time about his son and again made me promise never to let the world forget that his son gave the ultimate sacrifice—his life—to save the lives of four of his comrades. Little did I know that was the last time I’d hear his voice. We had talked about Skipper many times at our family reunions in Navy Pier, Michigan, but in 1992, we talked a long time about his desire to have his son's heroic acts remembered for generations to come.
What he gave me was a deathbed wish. My uncle Milton died in March of 1992 and today I honor his request by reminding this nation what a great and brave young man Skipper was. Just 16-days before his 19th birthday, Skipper died doing what he promised--protecting his country. He was an unusual young man who was mission-driven and very loyal to America.
Skipper was a breech baby and his birth mom, Clara, died thrusting him into this world. My paternal grandparents, Jacob Augustus and Zylphia Wareagle Spencer in their Englewood home, raised him. Skipper attended the Copernicus Grade School located in the Englewood community. Like his father, he was a photographer and had a voice of gold. He also briefly stayed with his father’s parents in Lexington, Miss.
But, while still in Chicago, Skipper, who according to our cousin, Dr. Barbara Jean Penelton, was not challenged in high school; so, he dropped out and went back to Mississippi where he joined a Freedom Voter Registration campaign.
When my Uncle Milton, who had remarried to the late Antoinette Marie Manor Olive, a Chicago school teacher, found out about that, he gave Skipper three choices: get back in school, get a job, or join the military. Uncle Milton feared the KKK would kill his only child.
Skipper knew Uncle Milton, a former City of Chicago Human Services supervisor, professional photographer, and civil rights activist, meant business. Skipper proudly joined the Army and in fact was injured shortly after that. He won a Purple Heart for his act of bravery but never told his father. Skipper, then a paratrooper, returned to the Army where he chose to die to save the lives of four friends who wee directly behind him during a search and destroy mission in Vietnam. Skipper was a proud paratrooper and like his dad was also a professional photographer.
I used to take Skipper stepmother to numerous Chicago veterans events given by Mayor Richard M. Daley and Illinois Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn. I thank both officials for doing what Uncle Milton always wished—to remind the world what his son did for this nation. I also thank Chuck Bowen, former executive assistant to Mayor Daley, and Col. Eugene Scott for their part in remembering Skipper's military feats.
And I thank the late President Lyndon Johnson who on April 21, 1966 during a Rose Garden ceremony bestowed the coveted Congressional of Honor medal to Uncle and his wife, Antoinette.
And, I would also like to thank the late Mayor Richard J. Daley who dedicated Olive Park (500 North Lake Shore Drive) after Skipper thanks to the lobbying efforts of the late Bishop Louis Henry Ford. To our knowledge, Chicago has the only lakefront park named after a Congressional of Medal recipient. But thanks also go to Chuck Bowen, former executive assistant to Mayor Daley, Ald. James Balcer, Rochelle Crump, former assistant director for the Illinois Veterans Affairs Department, veterans advocate Lawrence Pucci, and my cousins, Dr. Barbara Jean Penelton and Charlie Carter who grew up in the same home with Skipper, for helping to keep the legacy of Skipper alive.
I also thank Cook County Board President Todd H. Stroger for hosting a Thanksgiving Turkey Giveaway at the Copernicus Elementary School in Chicago where Skipper once attended. Our war hero lived the kind of life I wish today's youth would emulate.
Skipper never had a girlfriend, never dated, and he didn't drink or swear. He chose to die to save the lives of his friends.
How I wish our youth of today could be as focused and brave as Skipper. How I wish they could adopt his high morals and respect for their peers and the elderly. If Skipper were alive today, I have no doubt he would be out there marching against the senseless violence that has taken the lives of scores of children this year and the wounding of many more. As my pastor, Saint Sabina's Father Michael L. Pfleger, says of the killings "it just won't stop."
Every time a Chicago Public school child is shot, Pfleger now dispatches an emergency team to the site of the shooting where he offers a $5,000 reward for the shooter. He also calls on Illinois lawmakers to pass sensible gun laws. Pfleger has started a national debate after he turned the American flag upside down which is a sign of distress. After the deaths of 38 Chicago Public School students this year alone, Pfleger feels our communities are in distress.
The popular priest said: "it takes a village to raise a child, but the villages that produced Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King" and others "no longer exist. The communities no longer produce such giants" instead they are becoming dugouts for child killers, apathy, and a serious disconnect to each other. "We need some construction workers" to rebuild our communities," he said. "In Illinois, we have 24,000 black men in prison but only 11,000 black men in college." That, he said, is unacceptable and called for an end to the violence that is giving a black eye to Chicago and other urban areas.
Pfleger has also called on President Barack Obama to provide the same kind of financial and outreach support he executed in warning Americans about the Swine Flu, which has taken the lives of two Americans. Every time an illegal gun is fired, it leaves behind a broken family, hurt and bewildered students, and a feeling of hopelessness of funeral owners like Spencer Leak, Sr. who often buries these students for free.
To Skipper, I say thank you for your heroic act of bravery. Because of you, the four men you saved have grandchildren today, and your choosing death over life has admittedly taught one of the four not to hate African Americans. One of the three survivors has died, but I guess in death there was born a renewed life in your fellow comrades—a spirit of oneness…a spirit of love and respect for humanity no matter what color one may be.
And the three survivors often told me how Skipper forever changed their lives. I hope those students attending the Olive/Harvey College, the visitors who go to the Olive Park like Mr. Pucci who lives across from the park, and those living in the housing developments and military bases throughout the nation that were named after Skipper take a moment and reflect on the heroic acts of my cousin who loved his country so much he willingly paid the ultimate price—his life. Today, we should pay homage to all veterans. Disagree with the war if you will, but never turn your back on our soldiers. They need your moral support.
Thank you Skipper for your vision and acceptance of all men as your brothers and may all of us remember what you taught us—to believe in yourself, fight against injustices, but respect our country and people of all ethnic groups and religions. Skipper, you even loved some of your comrades who hated you because of the color of your skin. One of the men you saved apologized for hating you because you were Black and though white has now joined the NAACP. He is a changed man thanks to your love for mankind.
Ironically, it was the KKK who desecrated Skipper grave in Lexington, MS, and in Chicago someone defaced the plaque in Olive Park. These hateful acts went against the grain of Skipper's belief--that all men are born equal before the eyes of God. That was the fabric this young man was made of and at such a tender age. Thanks go out to my paternal grandparents for laying the moral character of this war hero whose spilled blood saved the lives of four men all of whom have grandchildren. Skipper's love just keep on going--generation after generation.
Chinta Strausberg
May 25, 2009
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Official data from the federal government:
Name: MILTON L. OLIVE III
Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Army, Company B, 2d Battalion (Airborne), 503d Infantry, 173d Airborne Brigade.
Place: Phu Cuong, Republic of Vietnam
Date: 22 October 1965
Entered service at: Chicago, Ill.
Born: 7 November 1946, Chicago, Ill.
G.O. No.: C.O. No.: 18, 26 April 1966.
Citation:
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Pfc. Olive was a member of the 3d Platoon of Company B, as it moved through the jungle to find the Viet Cong operating in the area. Although the platoon was subjected to a heavy volume of enemy gunfire and pinned down temporarily, it retaliated by assaulting the Viet Cong positions, causing the enemy to flee. As the platoon pursued the insurgents, Pfc. Olive and four other soldiers were moving through the jungle together with a grenade was thrown into their midst. Pfc. Olive saw the grenade, and then saved the lives of his fellow soldiers at the sacrifice of his by grabbing the grenade in his hand and falling on it to absorb the blast with his body. Through his bravery, unhesitating actions, and complete disregard for his safety, he prevented additional loss of life or injury to the members of his platoon. Pfc. Olive's extraordinary heroism, at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty are in the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and reflect great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of his country.
Here is a Chicago Tribune article written by a former colleague, Don Terry, who writes for the Chicago Tribune. Don and I met when I was a political reporter for the Chicago Defender newspaper.
THE MEN OF OLIVE COMPANY; FOUR SOLDIERS SURVIVED VIETNAM BECAUSE MILTON OLIVE DIDN'T
Chicago Tribune, 12 May 2002
By Don Terry
The other guys who came back to their Chicago neighborhood on leave couldn't wait to snatch off their uniforms and run the streets one last time before shipping out to Vietnam. Not Milton "Skipper" Olive. The kid was so proud he practically slept in his.
You'd get up for breakfast and there was Skipper in his uniform, buttering his toast. You'd say goodnight and there he was, nodding off on the sofa in his Army greens, the shadow of a smile marching across his face. Hut, two, three.
No doubt he would have worn his uniform out for a night on the town, but his father, Big Milton, kept him close to home. Milton was just 17.
Skipper, an only child, was "indulged," to put it politely. He got new bicycles for his birthday and cameras for Christmas. At family gatherings, when his cousins were dressed in jeans and t- shirts, he was often decked out in a suit that matched his dad's.
So it surprised his cousins that he had enlisted and become, of all things, a paratrooper. My goodness. He wasn't 6 feet tall standing on a stepladder. His rifle and rucksack probably weighed as much as he did.
True, he had always been on the thin side. But he had also displayed, from his first breath, what folks called grit. His mother, Clara Lee, died four hours after delivering him. The doctors didn't think her fragile baby boy would live more than a day or two.
But he lived: 18 years, 11 months and 15 days.
Then on Oct. 22, 1965, ambushed in a Vietnam jungle, Milton L. Olive III threw himself on a hand grenade to save four soldiers he hardly knew. Six months later, on April 21, with cherry blossoms in full bloom and war protests rumbling on the horizon, President Lyndon Johnson posthumously awarded Olive the Medal of Honor. In a Rose Garden ceremony, flanked by Mayor Richard J. Daley, the Olive family and two of the saved men--one black, one white--Johnson said that Olive's "instinct of loyalty" caused him to put others first and himself last. "In dying," the president said, "Pvt. Milton Olive taught those of us who remain how we ought to live."
Forever 18, Olive is buried in an all-black cemetery behind a small church in a Mississippi farming town. Today he is memorialized by Olive Terrace at Ft. Gordon near Augusta, Ga., Olive- Harvey community college on Chicago's Far South Side and Olive Park on the edge of the lake, just north of Navy Pier.
The men he saved are now grandfathers and great-grandfathers. There's little chance you've heard of them, yet they, too, are heroes. The ordinary, everyday heroes we send off to war and then forget. This is their story: who they were and who they became because a skinny teenager from the South Side gave them the gift of life.
At 73, Vince Yrineo, the Mexican-American platoon sergeant, is the oldest. For years after the ambush, slivers of shrapnel still worked their way out of his skin and snagged on his shirt. They fell to the floor like teardrops.
He still saves a tattered piece of metal from that day. It is Milton Olive's dog tag. It's about an inch long and weighs no more than a nickel. One edge looks as if a wild animal took a bite out of it; another has been pierced by something evil, leaving a jagged hole in its once-shiny silver skin. Yrineo has kept it for 37 years. "To me," he says, "it's something sacred."
Lionel Hubbard, the black private from west Texas, is 57. Still tall, but not as lean, he hopes to retire from his oil refinery job in a couple of years. He wants to concentrate on the nine houses he and his wife of 36 years own and rent out near Houston.
He tries not to think about Vietnam. "But if it wasn't for Milton," he says, "I know I wouldn't be here talking to you right now."
The other private, John Foster, a black boxer from Pittsburgh, is 56. The guys used to call him "Hop" because he was so fast in the ring and on the football field. He has lost sight in his left eye and part of his left foot to diabetes. Nobody calls him Hop anymore.
"I know that since Milton died," he says, "I'm living for two people, not one." Along with another ambush survivor, Foster attended the Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House.
Finally, there is Jimmy Stanford, the white lieutenant struggling to overcome a racist streak. He lives in San Antonio and is working on his fourth marriage. At 66, his hair is white as Texas cotton. His new wife is from Korea. Once upon a time, if anyone had told him he would end up marrying "a minority gal," he would have said they were crazy. He might have asked them to step outside.
"Milton Olive changed me," he says. "I made a vow never to forget him."
THE JUNGLE
The men of 3rd Platoon, Company B, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade, are humping and chopping their way through jungle so thick it swallows up the sunlight--and the Viet Cong. It's hot as an oven and Charlie's invisible. But he's out there, all right. And he's close. He has been sniping at Company B--the Bravo Bulls--off and on for most of the day.
Several hours have passed since a flock of helicopters plunked the paratroopers down somewhere in the vicinity of Phu Cuong early this October morning.
The orders sound simple enough. They always do to the brass in the back.
Search and destroy.
The problem is, the enemy is like a ghost and it's his haunted house. Death and Charlie are everywhere and nowhere.
A sniper already has killed George Luis, of Hawaii. A head shot. Nasty.
The platoon sergeant, Vince Yrineo, has to remind the men and him to keep moving. Mourn later.
At 36, Yrineo was a military lifer. A Los Angeles native, at 17 he enlisted in the Navy just after World War II, got out, played civilian for a while and then joined the Army when he got bored. He volunteered as a paratrooper after some jackass told him he didn't have the guts to jump out of a plane.
His divorced mother, Dolores, was from the old country, Mexico, and did whatever it took to keep her family of five boys and one girl from spending even one hungry night. She was a seamstress, a cook and, to hear her bemused son tell it, a successful bootlegger. "As a matter of fact," he says, "she bought a couple of houses with her earnings."
Yrineo's four brothers served in World War II. He wanted to be just like them even though he got disgusted with his country when his Japanese-American neighbors were rounded up at the beginning of the war and sent to internment camps. "It really teed me off," he says. "It still does. They were Americans like everybody else."
Third Platoon is on the right flank of the company when it comes to a clearing in the jungle, a burned-out patch of brown and black littered with charred tree stumps.
Jimmy Stanford, at 29 a senior citizen as first lieutenants go, doesn't have to remind his men to keep their eyes open and their trigger fingers ready. He does anyway.
He's the platoon leader, rotated in just three days ago. Not one of those West Point officers, Stanford is an enlisted man with ambition. It took him 11 years to earn his bars.
He joined the Army in 1954 when he was 18, a couple of years after dropping out of high school.
He was following family tradition. Stanford men have been putting on uniforms and marching off to battle since the War Between the States. His great-grandfather wore gray, a private in Company G, 46th Georgia Infantry. His daddy was a doughboy in World War I and survived a fog of poison gas rolling through his trench in France.
Stanford loved being a soldier. Still, working so closely with blacks and Latinos took some getting used to. Lake Jackson, Texas, was a segregated town and Stanford couldn't remember seeing blacks after dark as a kid in the 1930s and '40s. "They stayed in their place," he says. "We stayed in ours."
He learned that lesson early in life. A black woman worked for his family when he was 6 or 7. She had a son about his age and the two boys got to be pals. One day when Stanford was playing with his friend, his daddy came along and chased the boy off, telling him to go play with his own kind.
After that, when Stanford crossed paths with blacks and Latinos, "I'd give them hell," he says. "It was just normal racial harassment, nothing serious, practical jokes, name-calling, kid stuff."
In the jungles of Vietnam, Stanford didn't care if a soldier was black, white or blue so long as he did his job. But sometimes his upbringing showed. He once called a meeting of his squad leaders, two of whom were black, and told Yrineo to "go get those niggers."
The platoon begins moving through the clearing, when suddenly the thick, hot air is filled with bullets and grenades and the sound and smell of men getting hit by lead. Third Platoon has walked into an ambush.
"We didn't even see where it was coming from," says Hop Foster, then a 19-year-old private. "Either they opened up the ground and threw it up or they were up in the trees and tossed it down."
Just a couple of years earlier, Hop Foster's biggest worry in the world was where to celebrate with his black and Italian teammates after the Chiefs had beaten another opponent. For three years in a row, the Chiefs ruled sandlot football in Pittsburgh.
The son of a barroom bouncer and a domestic worker, Foster joined the Army at 18 because he needed a job after dropping out of school in 11th grade. But there was another reason he enlisted.
"I thought I was earning my citizenship by going into the service," he says. "I was paying my dues. Nobody could ever call me a second-class citizen now."
When the shooting starts, Lionel Hubbard, a 20-year-old private, dives behind what's left of a tree stump. "There was nothing else," he says. "If you raised up, you were dead."
The noise of battle is tremendous. So is the adrenaline roaring through Hubbard's slim body like a Texas twister.
His folks ran a cafe in Brownfield, Texas. They catered to the workers at the cotton compressor, and Hubbard helped out after school and on weekends. He joined the Army after graduating from high school because he didn't want to spend the rest of his life in a cafe.
He volunteered for the paratroopers because they were the toughest, the bravest, the elite. He loved jumping out of airplanes. But when he got to Nam, it took him a long time before he would shoot at the enemy. "I didn't want to fight because I didn't have nothing against the Vietnamese," he says. "It's more than a notion to take a person's life."
His first weeks there, he couldn't sleep. He couldn't eat. He watched people die. Young people just like him were shot to pieces. Body bags lined up in the mud waited for the choppers to take them away. "After a while," he says, "I started shooting at everything that moved. I still didn't want to fight. I still didn't have nothing against the Vietnamese. But it was either them or me."
Hubbard is pinned down with a cluster of men, hiding behind stumps, faces buried in the dirt, bullets whistling inches over their heads, grenades coming in. The men are too close together. Stanford, Foster and Yrineo are lying near Hubbard and so is the skinny kid from Chicago, Milt Olive.
It surprised some of the guys that Olive was from Chi-town. As Hop Foster says, even a blind man could see he wasn't one of those street-smart kind of cats. He was more like the guy who quietly plays chess in the corner of the juke joint, near the fun but not all the way in it. "He was kind of clean-cut," Foster says.
On the other hand, he wasn't a square, either. He didn't cuss like a lot of his Army buddies, but he didn't get shocked if someone else did.
Olive joined B Company as a replacement in July, almost four months before he was killed. He had a dry wit like his father. In a letter that summer to his cousin Barbara Penelton, who now heads the department of education at Bradley University, Skipper called himself "Uncle Sam's Number One Man in Viet Nam."
"Just a line to say hello," he wrote. "I'm over here in Never Never Land fighting this hellish war." Things had been "pretty tough" but they had "a ball" roasting wieners on sticks and "then we gathered around the fire."
"You said I was crazy for joining up," he continued, "well, I've gone you one better. I'm now an official U.S. Army Paratrooper. How does that grab you? I've made six jumps already."
He was wounded slightly in a firefight soon after joining the outfit, but never told his father. He didn't want to worry him.
The father, Milton B. Olive Jr., thought joining the Army would be good for his son, make a man of him. The boy would be fine. America was at peace when he signed up in 1964. No one had heard of Vietnam.
Big Milton clearly was devoted to his boy, dressing him in matching father-and-son suits, teaching him photography, giving him his name and the name of his father, but with one difference. When he took his frail son home from the hospital, he named him Milton Lee in memory of his late wife, Clara Lee.
Perhaps that's why Skipper always seemed more mature than other children. He had been on a first-name basis with death and loss since the day he was born. "He took everything serious," says Leonard Hampton, a childhood friend. "He was a little bit conservative. He didn't hang too tough with the guys."
His father's cousin raised little Milton for the first several years of his life. The boy also spent a lot of time with his father's parents on their farm in Mississippi. In 1952, Big Milton married a schoolteacher, Antoinette Mainor. Skipper returned to his father's house for a few years, but attended high school in Mississippi.
Before he dropped out of school to join the Army at 17, Skipper was already fighting for his country. He was helping civil-rights workers register black people to vote in the backwoods of Lexington, Miss. When his grandmother found out what he was doing, she had his father take him back up North. A few years earlier, another black boy from Chicago who misunderstood the way of the South, Emmett Till, had been lynched.
The family thought Skipper would be safer in the Army.
A bullet slams through Foster's helmet and rips off a piece of his eyebrow. "How bad?" he asks the man lying next to him.
"You'll live," Olive grins.
Moments later, a grenade lands in the middle of the five men.
"[It] was about a foot from my face," Stanford recalls. "Then out comes this black hand and grabs it."
According to Stanford, the last thing Olive says is, "Look out, Lieutenant, grenade!"
According to Foster, the last thing Olive says is, "Look out, Hop, grenade!"
The last thing Olive does is shove the grenade under his body, taking the full force of the blast. It throws him into the air and flips him over on his back.
"I heard a muffled sound," Foster says. "Then for some reason it seemed like everything went real quiet. It was like they stopped the war after that."
But the war hasn't stopped. GIs are getting hit left and right. Shrapnel hits Hubbard. The toes on his left foot are dangling by a thin thread of skin. His boot is filled with blood.
Shrapnel smashes into Yrineo's face, arm and chest.
Hubbard and Yrineo have to be carried to a chopper. Hubbard spends three weeks in the hospital; Yrineo spends five days.
Stanford is hit too, but he doesn't realize it until he's back at the base camp and sees that his shirt is soaked with blood. All told, more than a dozen men are wounded.
Charlie whispers away into the jungle like a ghost.
A few days later and 10,000 miles away, a man in a suit climbed the stone steps of a bungalow on the South Side of Chicago and rang the bell. Inside, preparing dinner, was Antoinette Olive, Skipper's stepmother.
The man had a letter in his hand.
"Is someone here with you?" he asked.
"No."
The man said he would stay until she finished the letter in case she needed assistance.
"He knew what he was doing," she recalls. "You could tell he had done it before."
The letter said her stepson had died for his country and his parents should be proud. "I was just numb," she says. "In the movies you see people reading these letters, and they just fall apart. But when it happens to you, you're just numb. You see it, you see the letters making the words that say your child is gone, but you just don't believe it."
The Army sent Olive's belongings to his parents, including an AM/ FM radio, a Bible and a camera. Olive loved taking photographs with his father, who made a few extra bucks snapping newlyweds and church picnics. Stuck inside the pages of his Bible was a business card his father had made for him years earlier: Milton Olive III, Chicago's only 12-year-old Professional Photographer.
Before Olive's body arrived home, his family was worried that he would have to have a closed-casket funeral because of the blast. But the grenade had not damaged his face. The war had.
"Oh my, how he had aged," his stepmother says.
THE SARGE
After all these years, the Sarge is still looking out for his men.
In a big red notebook in the small brick house where he lives alone just outside Tacoma, Wash., Vince Yrineo keeps the names of the eight men from his platoon who died during his first tour of duty. Each has a page in his sergeant's holy book, including the kid from Chicago, Milton Olive.
The Sarge also logs the dates they were born and when the Army stamped them KIA--killed in action. He keeps their hometowns and their serial numbers. He keeps their memories and his regrets. "So many young kids," he says, shaking his head, the book open in his lap. "They never had a chance to live. It makes you think the whole thing was a big waste."
They were killed by snipers and by exploding shells, by enemy ambushes and by friendly fire. They were killed despite his best efforts to keep them alive, to send them home to their families. "My son was about 12 years old at the time," the Sarge says. "I tried to think of the people I was in charge of as being him."
Milton Olive has a special place in his heart and in his house. On a nightstand next to the bed, Yrineo has a small photo of his deceased son on a laminated funeral card, dead at 23 from diabetes, along with a Bible and a crucifix. But looming over the bedside shrine is a framed black and white, 8-by-10 photograph of Milton Olive in uniform, his doe eyes peering out from the past.
Yrineo has had the photo for 27 years. He has had Olive's dog tag for even longer, ever since a young grunt wiped away the blood and jungle grime and handed it to Yrineo in 1965. "Here, Sarge," he said, "you'll know what to do with this."
He keeps the tag on a bed of cotton in an earring box. He always meant to give it to Olive's father. Maybe it would give the old man a little comfort. Or maybe it would break his heart all over again, Yrineo wasn't sure. So he kept it, and the years passed and so did Milton Olive's father, who died in 1993 before Yrineo could work up the nerve to part with the tag.
Now Jimmy Stanford, his old platoon leader, wants the tag. Of all the guys Milton Olive saved that day, Stanford admits to being changed the most. "A day doesn't go by that I don't think about it," he says.
When Yrineo showed him the dog tag a few years ago at a reunion, Stanford started bugging him for it.
No way, Yrineo said, no way in the world.
But Stanford kept pestering him and eventually they struck a deal.
"I told Jimmy if he outlives me he can have it," Yrineo says, leaning back in his living room recliner. "But that's the only way he's going to get it."
Stanford could have a long wait. At 73, Yrineo looks as though he could still fit into his old uniform. Every morning, if the weather is decent, he goes out into his back yard and raises the flag. Every evening at 5, he lowers it.
The ritual reminds him of the why of his life.
PRIVATE HUBBARD
Of the four men Milton Olive saved, Lionel Hubbard has built the highest wall around his soul to keep the past out.
He doesn't have his dog tags anymore and he can't find his Purple Heart. He was going to buy one on the Internet, but decided he didn't need it. The Purple Heart license plate on his truck is good enough for him.
On his fireplace mantel sits a black and white photograph of Hubbard in fatigues, the 173rd Airborne patch on his shoulder, a smile on his face. The photo reminds him of how thin he used to be as much as anything else. He'd like to lose a few pounds, but at 57 he's holding his own.
He doesn't go to reunions and he is not in touch with his old Army buddies. His scrapbook from Vietnam, the one with the photographs of dead comrades hung from trees by Charlie and dead VC with their ears cut off--"payback," he explains--was lost a long time ago. For years, he thought his wife had deliberately thrown it out, worried that the ghosts would disturb his sleep. She says it was inadvertently lost in a move.
Sometimes he misses the book. But mostly he thinks it's good that it's gone. He hasn't tried to forget exactly. He just hasn't tried to remember. Forgetting is impossible anyway. Whenever he gets dressed in the morning or undressed at night, Vietnam and Milton Olive are there, embedded in his calves.
"See those little black spots?" he says, rolling up his pants legs. "All grenade fragments from that day."
Then he unlaces his left work boot. He pulls off his sock and wiggles his toes. Two of the toes are gnarled and discolored, smaller than they should be. "I prayed to God every day I was over there, `Please let me make it back,' " he says. "Thanks to God and Milton, I did. Almost in one piece."
Hubbard has built a steady and comfortable life for himself and his family on a manmade lake in Texas City, Texas, about 35 miles south of Houston. He married his high school sweetheart, Madeline, in 1966, the year after Milton jumped on the grenade.
For the last 20 years he has worked at the Marathon plant, blending gasoline. His supervisor at work, Danny Anthony, also served in Nam. He was a medic. "I carried a lot of body bags," he says. When he and Hubbard talk, it's almost never about Vietnam.
Hubbard has three grown children, all born after Milton Olive died. He also has a granddaughter, money in the bank and plans to retire in a couple of years so he and his wife can travel around the country in a camper. "Life ain't been half bad," he says.
Every once in a while there will be a story on the news about war vets returning to Vietnam, searching "for closure or something, I guess," Hubbard speculates. "Me, I don't ever want to go back. I didn't lose anything over there."
HOP
The city of Miami is still waking up when John Foster's wife, Lula Mae, drives him to the VA hospital for his thrice-weekly, four- hour dialysis treatment. At 56, kidney failure and diabetes, what Foster calls "sugar," are slowly eating him away. He has lost the sight in his left eye, and part of his left foot has been amputated. "Vietnam didn't do me this much damage," he says.
At the VA, Foster eases into a chair and nods good morning to the vet from Korea and the one from Desert Storm. The wife of another old soldier hands him a cup of coffee. She always has coffee for the Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning regulars. "It's like a family," Foster says.
Foster stands out in this room full of veterans and beeping blood machines. He has a long, gray beard, a gold hoop earring and a skullcap.
"I really think my life was spared for a purpose," he says. "I'm not going to be Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, but if there's one soul I can save, one person I can help up, then my life was saved for a reason. I think it was so I could help spread the word of God. All I can do with the gift Milton gave me is to try to pass it on."
Foster is a follower of Yahweh Ben Yahweh, the self-proclaimed prophet of a sect of "black Hebrews" in Miami that worshiped at the "Temple of Love" and preached that its members were the chosen people of the Yahweh Nation.
"In other religions they don't talk about black people, like we don't exist," Foster says. "He showed us how we were in the Bible all along. He wasn't being anti-white, he was being pro-black."
When Foster first got out of the service in 1966, he was adrift. "It took me a long time to get over Vietnam," he says.
He knocked around Pittsburgh and New York for several years, doing maintenance work, partying and occasionally going to church. "I guess you could say I was searching," he says. "I asked myself, 'Why me? Why was my life saved?' "
He moved to Miami in 1975 and was hired to manage the executive parking lot of a local television station. In 1978, he became a follower of the charismatic Yahweh Ben Yahweh. "Yahweh is the best thing to happen to me since Milton saved my life," Foster says. "If I have to lay my life down now, I'm ready. I feel I know God."
After amassing a small empire of buildings, cars and good deeds in the 1980s, the sect was brought down in the early '90s by a federal racketeering indictment that included several counts of murder. Yahweh Ben Yahweh was acquitted of the most serious charges against him but served nine years in prison for conspiracy. Several other members were also sent to prison.
Foster, known within the troubled nation as Enoch Israel, was also indicted and spent three years in jail awaiting trial. A federal jury could not reach a verdict. After a plea agreement on state charges, he was released in 1994.
Once again, Milton Olive had helped save Foster.
Foster's lawyer in the federal case, Chris Mancini, told the jury about Foster's good character, his long and steady blue-collar work history, his military service and his Purple Heart. Then he showed the panel a photograph.
It was of Foster standing tall and proud in his uniform, looking over the shoulder of President Johnson at the White House during the Rose Garden ceremony for Milton Olive.
"I told them the whole story," Mancini says. "I told them that John was very moved by that kid."
THE LIEUTENANT
Jimmy Stanford is hurrying through the lunchtime crowd along the San Antonio Riverwalk, headed for the restroom, hoping for a little privacy. His eyes are starting to well up talking about what Milton Olive did for him and he doesn't want anyone to see him let loose.
He figures it's more than a little embarrassing, a past vice president of the Special Forces Association of San Antonio, with two tours in Nam under his belt and a Purple Heart on his wall, a mature man, as they say, with 13 grandchildren, a great-grandchild and a second on the way, crying in front of a bunch of tourists throwing tortilla chips at the ducks. People might think he's shell-shocked or something.
Coming back to the table a few minutes later, he says you'd reckon that at age 66 he wouldn't still get so emotional about something that happened 37 years ago, but the boy saved his life.
And opened his heart.
"His act definitely changed me," Stanford says, taking a long pull on his beer. "But it didn't happen overnight. I was a real redneck. I didn't just wake up one morning and say, 'I'm going to quit feeling negative about blacks.' It took several years."
He agrees it's a shameful commentary that Milton Olive had to jump on a hand grenade to push Stanford down this trail, but that's how it was. He's not proud of it; he's just trying to be honest.
He's not saying he's perfect now, either. He knows he still has work to do on his soul. He asks, Who doesn't?
It has been a rocky journey, not much different from the one the country he protected for 24 years as a soldier has been on since the civil rights movement. "I've tried to live a better life," he says. "I know I've treated people more fairly. Tolerance alone won't do it. You've got to trust one another."
He says what's happened to him lately is living proof that even an old, old dog can learn new tricks. After all, his fourth wife, Judy, is Korean. They got married last May. As far as he's concerned, Milton Olive was the best man.
She reaches across the table and gives his arm a squeeze.
"I think I got a good antique," she says, referring to their 13- year age difference.
His eyes are getting misty again.
Stanford has been sending Christmas cards to Olive's parents for 30 years. "I wanted to let his family know that I was grateful," he says. He used to address the cards to Mr. and Mrs. Olive until the father passed away in 1993 at age 81. His widow still has a stack of Christmas cards from Stanford, the latest one postmarked December 2001.
Stanford stayed in the Army for 13 years after Olive died. He says that back in 1970, the military went on "a sensitivity kick." Tension between black soldiers and white soldiers in Vietnam had grown increasingly thick, a reflection of troubles at home. The Army had to do something.
During his last four years in uniform, Stanford was assigned to the Army's Office of Race Relations and Equal Opportunity. He worked with a black sergeant, setting up seminars on race. "We were what they called a salt-and-pepper team," he says. "He was the good guy and I was the bad guy."
He says the Army figured the other white soldiers would be more willing to listen to one of their own, a veteran with a Texas accent. His buddies were not thrilled with the military or with him. They felt "a nigger program" was being shoved down their throats. "I lost some friends when I got into that field of work," Stanford says.
After leaving the Army, Stanford tried his hand at the home contracting business and spent 17 years at Dow Chemical. Now he works in the service department of a Cadillac dealership.
His narrow escape from Vietnam is never far from his thoughts. In 1991, he decided to visit Milton Olive's grave. The problem was, he wasn't sure where it was. Chicago, he assumed. He wrote Olive's father to make sure.
The old man quickly wrote back. Stanford still has the letter. "Thanks so much for remembering us," the father wrote. "You are the only one who has done so." He told Stanford that his son was buried in Lexington, Miss. He gave him some phone numbers of relatives he could stay with.
The next spring, Stanford had a wreath of plastic flowers made up in red, white and blue, arranged to look like a flag. He loaded it in his van and drove to Lexington and the small cemetery next to West Grove Church. There waiting for him was Olive's father, who had driven down from Chicago.
The two men had not seen each other since the Medal of Honor ceremony in 1966. They embraced, and Stanford laid his wreath. He stepped back from the grave, raised his trembling hand and saluted his fallen comrade.
Several of Olive's cousins walked up, stood beside Stanford and began to sing. They asked him to join. At first he begged off. His eyes and voice were full of tears. He turned away to regain his composure and then he, too, began to sing.
"I once was lost but now am found; was blind, but now I see."
Additional Data:
--- General / Personal ---
Last name: OLIVE
First name: MILTON LEE III
Home of Record (official): CHICAGO
State (official): IL
Date of Birth: Thursday, November 7, 1946
Sex: Male
Race: Negro
Marital Status: Single
--- Military ---
Branch: Army
Rank: PFC
Serial Number: 16810165
Component: Regular
Pay grade: E3
MOS (Military Occupational Specialty code): 11B1P
--- Action ---
Start of Tour: Saturday, June 5, 1965
Date of Casualty: Friday, October 22, 1965
Age at time of loss: 18
Casualty type: (A1) Hostile, died
Reason: Other explosive device (Ground casualty)
Country: South VietNam
Province: Unknown/Not Reported
The Wall: Panel 02E
MAY 25, 2009
Friday, December 5, 2008
O.J.: A victim of racial payback or a plague of stupidity?
Most Americans believe O.J. Simpson, once the darling of sports fans, was guilty 13-years ago when he was acquitted of allegedly killing his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and friend, Ron Goldman. The trial literally created a national racial divide and I suspect the recent sentencing of O.J. will mirror the flood of anger from the black and white community.
Many were not happy with District Judge Jackie Glass giving O.J. a pass on a life sentence, while others were glad she ordered him to jail for a maximum of 33 years. Still there are some Americans who feel the charges, conviction and sentencing were acts of white backlash after O.J. was acquitted of killing his wife and her friend.
Many were not happy with District Judge Jackie Glass giving O.J. a pass on a life sentence, while others were glad she ordered him to jail for a maximum of 33 years. Still there are some Americans who feel the charges, conviction and sentencing were acts of white backlash after O.J. was acquitted of killing his wife and her friend.
But, thirty-three years for being stupid enough to gather a bunch of equally idiot buddies, who were armed to the teeth,and trying to repossess his sports memorabilia from Bruce Fromong and Al Beardsley who were the alleged dealers who stole his precious belongings, is a bit much for a crime where no one was shot, wounded or died.
But, Hey,O.J. It was just material items--nothing serious enough to lose your freedom for at least nine-years when, if you're a good boy, you'll be eligible for parole in nine-years.
So, was the sentence meted out by Glass payback for O.J.'s acquittal? Some say no, other's say it is as clear as a goat's tail going up a mountain at high noon. Isn't it ironic that his sentence was handed down on October 3rd which was the 13th anniversary of O.J.'s victorious acquittal? But, no, says Judge Glass, she was not extracting judicial revenge for that trial led by the late famed Johnnie Cochran. I know he's turning in his grave right now saying: "How could you, O.J. after all I went through to keep your tired behind out of jail. I can't help you now, buddy. How could you have been so stupid, man"?
Judicial revenge or a balance of justice? O.J.'s sentence appears to be a bit much given thousandsof cases across America where murderers, rapists and pedophiles get feweryears.
No, this 33-year-sentence smells like judicial revenge for the highly emotionally-charged acquittal of O.J., and I predict he will win an appeal and there will be more outrage.
Poor O.J. Trouble follows this man having won one a major victory only to face the family of Ron Goldman who later won a civil lawsuit. O.J. will forever be haunted and harassed by whites who were angry that a black man allegedly killed a white woman and got away with it, and the racial divide between whites and blacks will continue to widen on this case as many African Americans still believe he was innocent 13-years ago and feel today he got another raw deal with this very steep sentence and whites have been waiting for their revenge. How dare a black man kill a white woman and get away with it. The jury acquitted him, but emotions still run high among the races.
Now that the day of judicial revenge has come, what will O.J. think about in his lonely cell for nine-years? Will he write another book? And, if so, will the Goldman's once again try to seize his money he needs to support his family? Will pro O.J. fans, and yes, there are some, begin a bank fund to help him. When will the harassment end for this foolishand yes stupid man. A jury acquitted him of killing his ex-wife. Why can't some Americans accept this and let it go, or is the reason that the verdict is covered with the racism of the past?
I suspect O.J. will get even more famous now. I believe he'll get pounds of fan mail and perhaps some proposals from lonely, desparate women, white and black. African Americans don't like to see black men being perceived as victims of a proven unfair judicial system. Watch and see. There will be a movie and some books written about this. Someone will make money, but the hurt and deep scars of the Goldman's will only get deeper and wider, and O.J.'s children will once again relive that 13-year-old nightmare. There are no rewards for bitterness, no rewards for seeds of hate. The O.J. haters need to let go and let God take care of their pain and O.J.'s punishment.
After millions of dollars have been spent on trial after trial, arrest after arrest, when the dust settles, what if O.J. was afterall innocent? What if one day one or more men and/or women confessed to her murder? How then will O.J. and his family, who are also victims of these crimes, ever be made whole again?
How many wrongful convictions have we seen in our life times? No one knows for sure who killed Nicole and Ron except the victims and they are at peace. America, please let this go of this 'let's get O.J.' syndrome and give this nation the racial peace it needs to move forward. Just let it go, but you won't. Already, I've heard too many "finally, he got what he deserved" remarks. How petty and racist these remarks sound. If O.J. is guilty of anything, it is being just plain stupid. Sometimes I think he's living on a stage--acting his way through life and if so losing his freedom will be one reality check that just may bring him back down to the real deal.
Ihope someone out there sends him a bible so he, like thousands of others, can find God and inner peace. O.J. needs the guidance of God, not man, for his friends have guided him right into a boobie trap that could have beena life time sentence.
Say a prayer for O.J. Pray that he cleanses his soul from stupidity, from materialistic desires, and let him revisit his roots and the roots of his ancestors so he too will never forget from whence he comes, never forget on whose shoulders he stands. My prayers are with O.J., his children and his family for they are prisoners of his pain and wrong choices, too. But, I pray also for the Goldman's--all of them are prisoners of hatred, pain, and an emptiness that will never be replaced. Man's extremity is God's opportunity. The dead are gone, but let the living redeem themselves for their own sake.
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