Herbert Hoover

On October 17, 2003, HERBERT HOOVER JAMERSON, of Selbyville, DE., formerly of Baltimore, MD. He was a WWII and Korean War veteran. Survived by his wife Janet Jamerson, his mother Cassie T. Martin, a son Herbert Martin and his wife Tina and daughter Yvonne Cheree. Also survived are his sisters Gladys Day, Lillie Kemp, Delores Mitzel, Rose Hale and Katherine Grinnell and two grandchildren Trevor and Jenna also several nieces and nephews. Chapel Service Wednesday, October 22st at 11 A. M at the Delaware Veteran Cemetery in Millsboro, DE. Friends may call Tuesday, October 21st 3:30 to 7 P.M. at Hastings Funeral Home, 19 S. Main St., Selbyville, DE

"You will be our president when you read this note," George Herbert Walker Bush wrote to Bill Clinton, the man who defeated him in the 1992 campaign, denying Mr. Bush the provisional vindication that reelection provides until history has its chance to judge from a distance. Nonetheless, in Oval Office tradition, Mr. Bush left a note for Mr. Clinton to read on taking office, and it echoed the message of transitions past, even between bitter political rivals: "I am rooting hard for you. " Note the pronoun: You will be our president.

RON BROWN would have enjoyed the irony of it all. His death on a war-recovery mission to Bosnia and Croatia last week effectively ends Republican efforts to abolish his Department of Commerce and scatter most of its functions to oblivion or other agencies. Actually, the House proposal, a part of Speaker Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America," was already making little headway in the Senate, where it encountered a reality check among senior Republicans.What some of the young Turks in the GOP forgot or never knew was that the Department of Commerce was a creation of two Republican presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and that it achieved its greatest influence in the 1920s under a secretary who became president, Republican Herbert Hoover.

H. L. Mencken would have savored this presidential election year. To him, political conventions and elections were made for "connoisseurs of the obscene." He had a lusty appetite for crackpots of every kind. "A good politician, under democracy," he wrote, "is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar." In the romantic era of the 1920s, when Mencken reigned from Baltimore as America's most famous journalist, presidential primaries were few. The suspense of national conventions rested in watching the candidates jockey for position at state caucuses in hotels outside the convention hall.

The USS Sequoia, the former rum-runner turned presidential yacht that was a floating getaway for chief executives from Herbert Hoover to Jimmy Carter, recently completed needed repairs at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels. If you really want to impress family and friends, the historic vessel - on which Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill began planning for D-Day and Richard M. Nixon came to the wrenching conclusion that his presidency was coming to an end - can be chartered for a four-hour cruise.

PRESIDENT Bill Clinton celebrated his 47th birthday yesterday. He is the third person to turn that age while president.The first was Ulysses S. Grant. He was born April 27, 1822. He was 46 when he took office on March 4, 1869, and became 47 seven weeks later. The second president to turn 47 in the White House was Theodore Roosevelt. TR was born Oct. 27, 1858. He became president upon the death of William McKinley on March 13, 1901. So he celebrated his 43rd, 44th, 45th and 46th birthdays while president.

Los Angeles. -- Are you better off than you were four years ago? Most of us are not, to the point that we may not only make George Bush a one-term president, but could even elect a man most of us feel we do not know -- in a landslide.Four years ago, then-Vice President Bush said something sad but true: ''For the Democrats to do well, the country has to do badly.''Now, obviously the country is doing badly. This part of it, California, is doing very badly. Unemployment in Riverside County is now more than 15 percent.

Earlier this month at the Holiday Inn in Timonium, an unusual piece of Baltimoreana was auctioned off by the Baltimore Book Co.: a menu and book that heralded perhaps the most celebrity-studded dinner the city has ever played host to. On the cover of the menu is a picture of a Fokker F VII monoplane flying above crossed flags. In rather smallish type below: "A Dinner to Van-Lear Black Given by His Friends." Inside, in a more whimsical type next to a picture of the plane is printed: "A Dinner to welcome VAN-LEAR BLACK on the occasion of his return to Maryland after a successful flight by airship from Amsterdam to Batavia and Return.

I GOT MY education in election-year politics around the kitchen table at the old house on Guilford Avenue. It was a place where I heard everything from talk about the greatness of Herbert Hoover (no lie) to the morning-after uncertainties of the Kennedy-Nixon contest of 1960. I'll never forget coming down that November day and studying the early results published in this newspaper with my grandmother. At 7 in the morning, we didn't know if it would be Kennedy or Nixon. One thing I did learn from my elders' generation.

For more than 40 years, Walter Trohan watched much of American history from the front row.As a young reporter in Chicago, the Columbia resident was the first journalist to arrive on the scene of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.During his 21 years as the Chicago Tribune's bureau chief in Washington, he covered three summits and the Paris Peace Talks in 1968. Along the way, he ate, drank, joked, argued and traveled with five American presidents.In the wake of last week's inauguration, Mr. Trohan will share some of his thoughts on the press and politics at an 8 a.m. breakfast Tuesday at the Columbia Hilton.

So my boss, a nice enough fellow, wanders up to my cubbyhole the other day with an idea for a column: Lay out the positions of Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama on outdoors issues. As that great political observer John McEnroe might reply, "You cannot be serious." For if there's one thing I have learned about our relationship, dear readers, is that elections come with their own scorched-earth policy. No one survives. It's bad enough that every four years or so, some politician goes to a sporting goods store and buys himself (yes, it is almost always a guy)

Will O'Malley face the same standard? In the wake of the latest episode in our great experiment in democracy, I find myself reflecting on the politics of the past four years ("O'Malley, Cardin declare victory," Nov. 8). Four years ago, the state of Maryland was in dire financial straits. Today, we have a budget surplus instead of a deficit, a growing economy and improving test scores among public school students. All of these things were accomplished during a time of divided government in Maryland.

I GOT MY education in election-year politics around the kitchen table at the old house on Guilford Avenue. It was a place where I heard everything from talk about the greatness of Herbert Hoover (no lie) to the morning-after uncertainties of the Kennedy-Nixon contest of 1960. I'll never forget coming down that November day and studying the early results published in this newspaper with my grandmother. At 7 in the morning, we didn't know if it would be Kennedy or Nixon. One thing I did learn from my elders' generation.

On October 17, 2003, HERBERT HOOVER JAMERSON, of Selbyville, DE., formerly of Baltimore, MD. He was a WWII and Korean War veteran. Survived by his wife Janet Jamerson, his mother Cassie T. Martin, a son Herbert Martin and his wife Tina and daughter Yvonne Cheree. Also survived are his sisters Gladys Day, Lillie Kemp, Delores Mitzel, Rose Hale and Katherine Grinnell and two grandchildren Trevor and Jenna also several nieces and nephews. Chapel Service Wednesday, October 22st at 11 A. M at the Delaware Veteran Cemetery in Millsboro, DE. Friends may call Tuesday, October 21st 3:30 to 7 P.M. at Hastings Funeral Home, 19 S. Main St., Selbyville, DE

The USS Sequoia, the former rum-runner turned presidential yacht that was a floating getaway for chief executives from Herbert Hoover to Jimmy Carter, recently completed needed repairs at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels. If you really want to impress family and friends, the historic vessel - on which Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill began planning for D-Day and Richard M. Nixon came to the wrenching conclusion that his presidency was coming to an end - can be chartered for a four-hour cruise.

Earlier this month at the Holiday Inn in Timonium, an unusual piece of Baltimoreana was auctioned off by the Baltimore Book Co.: a menu and book that heralded perhaps the most celebrity-studded dinner the city has ever played host to. On the cover of the menu is a picture of a Fokker F VII monoplane flying above crossed flags. In rather smallish type below: "A Dinner to Van-Lear Black Given by His Friends." Inside, in a more whimsical type next to a picture of the plane is printed: "A Dinner to welcome VAN-LEAR BLACK on the occasion of his return to Maryland after a successful flight by airship from Amsterdam to Batavia and Return.

So my boss, a nice enough fellow, wanders up to my cubbyhole the other day with an idea for a column: Lay out the positions of Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama on outdoors issues. As that great political observer John McEnroe might reply, "You cannot be serious." For if there's one thing I have learned about our relationship, dear readers, is that elections come with their own scorched-earth policy. No one survives. It's bad enough that every four years or so, some politician goes to a sporting goods store and buys himself (yes, it is almost always a guy)

H. L. Mencken would have savored this presidential election year. To him, political conventions and elections were made for "connoisseurs of the obscene." He had a lusty appetite for crackpots of every kind. "A good politician, under democracy," he wrote, "is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar." In the romantic era of the 1920s, when Mencken reigned from Baltimore as America's most famous journalist, presidential primaries were few. The suspense of national conventions rested in watching the candidates jockey for position at state caucuses in hotels outside the convention hall.

BIG MEADOWS, Va. -- Old-timers may remember such Depression-era terms as "Hoover blankets," "Hoover flags" and "Hoovervilles" or "Hoover camps."They were named for President Herbert C. Hoover, who was blamed for the unemployment and poverty caused by the Depression. "Hoover blankets" were old newspapers the homeless used to keep warm. The flags were empty pockets turned inside out. The 'villes and camps were shantytowns built by the unemployed.The Hoover camp hidden in the Blue Ridge Mountain woods here, however, was no village of tar-paper shacks.

RON BROWN would have enjoyed the irony of it all. His death on a war-recovery mission to Bosnia and Croatia last week effectively ends Republican efforts to abolish his Department of Commerce and scatter most of its functions to oblivion or other agencies. Actually, the House proposal, a part of Speaker Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America," was already making little headway in the Senate, where it encountered a reality check among senior Republicans.What some of the young Turks in the GOP forgot or never knew was that the Department of Commerce was a creation of two Republican presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and that it achieved its greatest influence in the 1920s under a secretary who became president, Republican Herbert Hoover.