Time and old Marines march on

As a youngun I was raised on a 300 acre dairy farm 35 miles from the capitol building in Atlanta Georgia. Today you'd be hard pressed to find a working farm of even a few acres that close. Mostly it's covered in asphalt or concrete and houses.........
......every where you look there are houses, of all stripes and colors. Big and small, until the last year when the house construction industry went tits up, the once fertile land grows only houses.

Still I learned many things there, how to find pecans in the grass of our yard in the fall, how to catch a baseball thrown up on the tin roof of the smoke house, rolling off into my bare hands, or later my first baseball glove. I learned to ride a used 36 inch bicycle even though my legs were too short to reach the ground on either side (I'd lean it over on a terrace row so I could get my leg over to the peddle and push off and peddle like hell till I got to the peach orchard where I'd grab a limb over my head and let the bike wobble on 'til it fell over............then do it over, and over, and over again. Later as my legs stretched out a bit, I'd spend hours and hours riding around the big turn around in front of the milk barn where the tractor trailer with the big milk tank would come to suck up our milk along with other members of the Atlanta Dairy Cooperative, to take back to Atlanta and bottled or made into ice cream and cheese, and sold all over Georgia.

I learned to read, in part, because the Atlanta Constitution newspaper was delivered ever day..........and while my dad and mom read the more important stuff I'd keep up with the adventures of Dick Tracy, Smiling Jack, The Phantom and many other characters on the cartoon page, or multiple pages in the Sunday edition.

Eventually the Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution were combined into one paper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which today struggles like many papers around the country to keep readership in an era when many get their news and entertainment from the TV..........and more and more.......the internet.

I long ago stopped subscribing to the paper, because they'd grown fat on the advertising pages to the point that there were almost two pages of advertising to one page of news and business. I now fall into that percentage that gets most of my news from the internet or radio while riding in my Dodge Ram.

So it surprises me a bit to be posting a link Here to an article in the paper. (I did find it online)

It concerns a gift from old Sam Magill, (gone lo these many years) longtime publisher of the paper, to the surviving members of the 1st Marine division, who stormed, and eventually, after six months of fighting and dying, took the island of Guadalcanal during WWII, of an old and expensive bottle of Cognac, to be opened by the last surviving member of the division that actually fought on that terrible bit of rock and sand sitting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Read the story for yourself, think what you may about it and the members of what some have called our Greatest Generation. Maybe, like me, you'll raise a silent toast, either in your mind, or in fact, to those men, and one newspaper editor and publisher, who made a gift of a lifetime.