good talk

William Christopher was on all 11 seasons of M*A*S*H, playing the gentle Father Mulcahy, very well.  Lawrence Linville, Major Frank Burns died in 2000, a memorable-character.  The series theme song was "Suicide Is Painless"  (...it brings on many changes...).  In WW 11, my father was in N. Africa and Italy, an officer in tank-ordnance, during Korea, he was officer-in-charge of the Brook Park Tank Plant, also called the Cadillac Tank Plant, outside of Cleveland, the BPTP being the sole-producer of the M41 Walker Bulldog, which one-upped the tanks used by the N. Koreans.  My friend, Greg's, Dad, was an instructor stateside during WW 11 (told his son, going-out with the same woman twice didn't make any sense), but during the Korean War was part of a bomber-crew which flew many missions, Greg nodded smilingly, I guess that made-up for it, guess so.  For kindergarten (I was the first of my race ever to go to kindergarten), I went to "Our Lady of the Elms", which was a Catholic girls school from 1st thru the 12th Grade, but for kindergarten they also had boys, thought they could handle us at that age.  It was just a half-day, I learned hardly anything.  At the conclusion of the school-year, they had a big graduation ceremony for us kindergarteners, with the little boys wearing white suits, and I suppose the girls were also in white, eh, sure of it.  And we had a commencement-speaker, to give us a talk before we went-out into the world, and he was a priest who had just gotten-back from Korea (the nun said ...Where they have machine-guns...).  I went to St. Sebastian's Grade School, for 1st, 2nd, 6th, 7th, and 8th grades (3rd, 4th, and 5th, I was in Germany), and in those days, the nuns would hit the kids, just the boys, maybe a third of them who the nuns thought might have the devil in them, they really did nothing to deserve this other than, and no, Ed wasn't among them, maybe you're surprised.  I saw Cyndi Lauper on a talk-show and she said ...The boys got the hell knocked out of them...  The targeted-boys would get smacked-around and then made to kneel before the statues of saints for a long time, looking chastened.  My fore-mentioned friend who was in the Italian branch of organized-crime, his father was an under-boss, and he was done this way ...I was always getting-it...  I wasn't surprised, the attitude was, this is our school, if you don't like the way your child is treated, you can withdraw him.  The nuns didn't care who anybody's father was, they didn't give a hoot about anything