The Millbrook Times

Don’t know why this caught my eye but it reminded me of George W Bush who was a cheerleader at Yale, and of course the pictures are great.

Lawrence Herkimer, Grandfather of Modern Cheerleading, Dies at 89
Lawrence R. Herkimer, who elevated cheerleading into an aspirational goal for generations of youths and a highly successful business for himself, organizing camps for would-be cheerleaders and selling the clothing and gear they would need, died on Wednesday in Dallas. He was 89.

The cause was heart failure, his grandson Michael Dewberry said.

Mr. Herkimer was often called the grandfather of modern cheerleading and Mr. Cheerleader. Not only did his enterprises achieve sales of $50 million a year, he also patented the pompoms that have become a staple of cheerleading and invented a leap known as the “Herkie jump” that is widely used by squads across the country.

Mr. Herkimer had been a scholarship student and head cheerleader at Southern Methodist University in Dallas when, after graduating in 1948, he borrowed $600 from a friend of his father-in-law’s to begin what would amount to an American cheerleading industry, setting up shop in his garage.

His first cheerleading camp attracted 52 girls and one boy; in his second year, enrollment climbed to 350.

A reader from Clove Valley sent this video knowing old videos often appear on this site. Do anyone of our readers question the 1905 date?

The world’s 400 richest people lost a combined $70 billion on Monday as equity markets around the globe were hammered on fears about Greece and declines in China fueled by leveraged investors exiting the market.
The loss for the billionaires amounted to an average decline of $175 million, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest person and the world’s 59th-richest, was one of only 12 billionaires among the 400 to increase their fortunes on the day, rising $180 million to $15.3 billion. Dangote Cement rose 2.35 percent.

The collective decline for the billionaires amounted to a fall of more than 1.5 percent. The combined loss is more than the market capitalization of Ford Motor Co. or Twenty-First Century Fox Inc. The S&P fell 2.1 percent on the day and the NASDAQ dropped 2.4 percent. In Europe, the Euro Stoxx index lost 4.2 percent. China’s Shenzhen Stock Exchange Composite index lost more than 6 percent of its value.
Among the world’s richest people, Spain’s Amancio Ortega had the biggest fall, losing $2.2 billion on the day, a 3.2 percent decline. Ortega is Europe’s richest person and the world’s second-richest individual with $69.2 billion. U.S. investor Warren Buffett is the world’s third-richest person with $67.1 billion and he lost $1.6 billion. Bill Gates, the richest person on the planet, lost $1.4 billion, a 1.7 percent decline. The world’s 400 richest people control a combined $4.2 trillion, almost $400 billion more than the GDP of German

No matter what your political views are, there was a moment this week that reminded me of Marian Anderson’s singing God Bless America at the Lincoln Memorial.
Our President and the Presidency looked pretty impressive, a little off key and no prompter but the song came from the red blood cells of the heart and not from the gray cells of the brain.
I wonder where Joe Wilson was, the Congressman from South Caolina who called the President a liar in his State of the Union speech last year?

In March Brian Williams was sent to the woodshed amid controversy about his conflating ( a wonderful new word for just such an act) the details in about 10 or 12 of the stories he covered over the years.

I found the below paragraph about his popularity.

‘In February, Mr. Williams ranked as the 23rd-most-trusted person in the country, on par with Denzel Washington, Warren E. Buffett and Robin Roberts. By May, his trust ranking had plummeted to 3,352, near the rapper Eminem and the Playboy tycoon Hugh Hefner, according to the Marketing Arm, a research firm whose celebrity index is closely watched by media and marketing executives.”

Today NBC announced that he was being brought back from the woodshed but in an unannounced and diminished role at NBC or perhaps MSNBC.

I have an idea for a perfect program for him. There was a show in the 1950s called Person to Person with the great Edward R. Morrow going into famous peoples homes and interviewing them. I don’t know why the show or the idea of the show hasn’t ever been revived but I suggest it to the Poobahs at NBC, if any read this blog, probably a very conflated possibility.

A poem by Robert Service in a small book of poems entitled, “Rhymes of a Red Cross Man”, and dedicated to his brother Albert Service who died in the Great War.

Oh, weren’t they the fine boys! You never saw the beat of them,
Singing all together with their throats bronze-bare;
Fighting-fit and mirth-mad, music in the feet of them,
Swinging on to glory and the wrath out there.
Laughing by and chaffing by, frolic in the smiles of them,
On the road, the white road, all the afternoon;
Strangers in a strange land, miles and miles and miles of them,
Battle-bound and heart-high, and singing this tune:

It’s a long way to Tipperary,
It’s a long way to go;
It’s a long way to Tipperary,
And the sweetest girl I know.
Good-bye, Piccadilly,
Farewell, Lester Square:
It’s a long, long way to Tipperary,
But my heart’s right there.

The gallant old “Contemptibles”! There isn’t much remains of them,
So full of fun and fitness, and a-singing in their pride;
For some are cold as clabber and the corby picks the brains of them,
And some are back in Blighty, and a-wishing they had died.
And yet it seems but yesterday, that great, glad sight of them,
Swinging on to battle as the sky grew black and black;
But oh their glee and glory, and the great, grim fight of them! —
Just whistle Tipperary and it all comes back:

It’s a long way to Tipperary,
It’s a long way to go;
It’s a long way to Tipperary,
And the sweetest girl I know.
Good-bye, Piccadilly,
Farewell, Lester Square:
It’s a long, long way to Tipperary,
But my heart’s right there

This afternoon, the Government of Ontario took a bold and necessary step to protect pollinators with new regulations that reduce the use of neonicotinoids by 80 percent for corn and soybeans. Bees worldwide are dying at an alarming rate, approximately 40% of all bee colonies die annually. The U.S. has yet to regulate the use of a specific class of tree and plant sprays that have proven to kill off bee populations.

http://news.ontario.ca/ene/en/2015/06/ontario-introducing-new-rules-to-protect-pollinators.html

…for any reader who can identify the car in the below photograph which was parked on 86th Street in New York City yesterday afternoon. Hint- It did not belong to Colombo.

From time to time we have reported on the Thorne Building in Millbrook. One of our readers suggested we put the elusive movie theater in the building. I’ve never been inside but the building has long been unoccupied and was the subject of a failed development last year. I haven’t kept up with the latest news but maybe one of our readers can give us an update.